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OXFORD

UNIVERSITY press

MAGAZINE

FOUNDED IN 1850 / VOL. 338, NO. 2027
APRIL 2019
WWW.HARPERS.ORG

Letters

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Easy Chair

No Exit

Harper’s Index

Readings

Salable Virtues
Occidents Happen
America
Come as You Are
The Indirect World
And...

Criticism
LIKE THIS OR DIE
The fate of the book review in the age of the algorithm

From the Archive

Literary Failure

H CCQ\T

WHISPERINGS
A writer alone with the work

Letter from Guatemala
DESTINED FOR EXPORT
The troubled legacy of Guatemalan adoptions

Essay

WORKS OF MERCY
The power of pastoral care

Revision

MORE THAN A DATA DUMP
Why Julian Assange deserves First Amendment protection

Memoir

NIGHTMARES AT 20,000 FEET
On the dread of looking down

Story

SETTING THE WORLD TO RIGHTS

Reviews

NEW BOOKS

SHALLOW CALLS TO SHALLOW
On Thomas Merton, fifty years after his death

DOWN AND OUT IN THE PELOPONNESUS
Christos Ikonomou’s modern tragedies

Puzzle

Findings

Joanne G. Murphy, Alice Kidd

Lionel Shriver

Rony Brauman
How the West was spun
Solmaz Sharif

Heads, shoulders, knees, and O’s
Clarice Lispector

Tizta Berhanu, Janna Ireland, Michael Koerner,
and a robot talks itself out of a job

Christian Lorentzen

Elizabeth Hardwick

David Means

Rachel Nolan

John Crowley

James C. Goodale

Cover: Illustration by Nate Kitch

LETTERS

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Crimes and Misdemeanors

I agree with Lionel Shriver’s as¬
sertion that the complete cultural
banishment to which perceived sex¬
ual offenders are sometimes subjected
is harsh, and mindlessly so [“Cruel
and Unusual Punishment,” Easy
Chair, February]. The idea that we
must scour our libraries, museums,
cable feeds, and movie houses for
the output of anyone morally im¬
perfect is absurd on its face. An art¬
ist’s work attains a life of its own,
firmly apart from its creator: it
moves beyond his or her private
identity to touch something univer¬
sal in us. This is precisely why it has
value. To dismiss this output be¬
cause of flawed behavior and human
frailty is cultural suicide.

Shriver rightly points out that it
is all the more vital to preserve
what’s positive in the artist’s oeuvre,
especially in the face of a negative
revelation. Who among us, after all,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.
Please address mail to Letters, Harper’s
Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, NY.
10012, or email us at letters@harpers.org.
Short letters are more likely to be published,
and all letters are subject to editing. Volume
precludes individual acknowledgment.

would consent to be judged solely
on the basis of the worst thing we
have ever done? Perhaps a subse¬
quent generation, inoculated against
the wildfire of social media, will see
fit to resist this trend.

Joanne G. Murphy
Chicago

Times of major societal change
can be difficult to live through—
public values shift quickly and there
can be a lag in more tempered re¬
sponses. I appreciate that Shriver’s
fears and concerns may be justified at
this time, but I also live with the
memory of the Fifties and Sixties,
when a woman’s association with sex¬
ual behavior was likely to result in so¬
cial, economic, and reputational
damages. The promise of the #MeToo
movement is a better world for all of
us, even if the cost for now is fear and
a period of chaotic reactions.

Alice Kidd

Lillooet, British Columbia

The conclusion to Shriver’s line of
reasoning is that since a rape takes
only a short matter of time, and on¬
going abuse often just a few months

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

or years, penalties for the perpetra¬
tors of these acts should be capped
proportionally. Furthermore, con¬
sumers should forever have access to
these artists’ works, and the artists
access to the funds generated from
that work.

As a clinical psychologist, I know
from experience that the lives of
those who have been sexually as¬
saulted and abused are impacted for¬
ever. This is supported by years of
published research. Shriver fails to
make the case for why the conse¬
quences of these acts should have a
shorter life span for the perpetrators.

Lynda A. Archer

Gabriola Island, British Columbia

Hidden Dragon

Kishore Mahbubani’s supposition
that the United States is young in
comparison to China and therefore
naive or troublesome is a common
fallacy [“What China Threat?,”
Criticism, February]. Our concepts
of government, justice, and economy
were not new in 1776—they were
imports of the European Enlighten¬
ment, the Magna Carta, Roman
law, and fifth-century bc Greece—
whereas the current model of Chi¬
nese politics and economics is a
more recent hybrid of capitalism
and Chinese characteristics. One
should keep in mind that this model
has done well over the past forty
years mostly because China had
much room for growth at the outset,
enjoying the architecture of global
capitalism established by Western
nations whose own growth has nec¬
essarily leveled off.

Charles Rice

Colorado Springs, Colo.

Just because China has learned
not to use the raw military methods
of past empires—relying instead on
sharklike development loans and
infrastructure projects—does not
mean it won’t use its military when
the time is right. Mahbubani avoids
mentioning that China’s military
spending is second only to that of
the United States and is increasing.
He creates the impression that only

the United States has issues with
China, yet many developing nations
with economies now closely en¬
twined with China’s have begun to
recoil. Unlike the United States,
China does little to stop its compa¬
nies from corrupting local offi¬
cials—further obstructing the
world’s movement to freer societ¬
ies—and has adopted Russia’s ap¬
proach of shaping foreign political
bodies through more discreet and
indirect means.

The author is right that the United
States needs a long-term strategic ap¬
proach to China. In my view, that
should entail the democracies of the
world uniting economically against
China’s rise until China becomes a
fair dealer and human rights defender;
they must also be willing to use force
if necessary to protect our ideals and
way of life.

Anthony Buch
Seattle

Power and the Passion

Far more elderly women than
men are caregivers for spouses with
dementia or other long-term ill¬
nesses, yet we don’t see a pattern of
these women shooting, smothering,
poisoning, or bludgeoning their
husbands under the misnomer of
“mercy killing,” the term prefer¬
red by Ann Neumann [“Going to
Extremes,” Letter from Lancaster
County, February]. Indeed, the
physical and emotional burdens on
female caregivers are often greater
than on their male counterparts,
and depression, stress, and over¬
whelming financial demands
plague wives who must care for
their husbands, too.

To say that cases in which men
have violently ended their sick
wives’ lives only “highlight the con¬
sequences of rigid gender roles that
designated men as their wives’ pro¬
tectors,” ignores the myriad ways
our society consistently devalues
women’s lives. Since when do the
duties of a “protector” involve kill¬
ing his charge?

Mary Giannakou
Tappan, N.Y.

LETTERS 3

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EASY CHAIR

No Exit

By Lionel Shriver

F or American liberals, the Euro¬
pean Union is a bastion of social
justice, secular humanism, and
civic virtue. Taxed gratefully into equal¬
ity, its subjects spend their days recy¬
cling kefir containers and protecting the
realm from genetically modified foods.
Only this wise, collegial institution
prevents a recrudescence of World War
II. After Bush v. Gore and Trump, it’s to
this land of milk and honey—or creme
fraiche and Cointreau—that disgusted
Democrats have threatened to decamp,
although my compatriots rarely seem to
go. That may be fortunate. Fantasies
rarely survive close scrutiny.

For it’s more the case that the EU is
a bloated bureaucracy packed with
pampered timeservers inventing gratu¬
itous regulations to justify their sine¬
cures. A fine idea when first conceived
as a free-trade bloc, the profligate,
power-hungry body has warped into a
centralizing political project without
asking the irrelevant little peons it
governs whether they want a federated
Europe. Originally meant to mutually
benefit a handful of similarly scaled
economies, the now unwieldy alliance
has since absorbed a plethora of far
poorer countries and is thus also evolv¬
ing into a transfer union—to many a
German’s dismay.

The EU is antidemocratic by de¬
sign; as the popularly elected European
Parliament cannot originate legisla¬
tion, its most considerable expenditure
must be crate after crate of rubber
stamps. Brussels’s vaunted “freedom of
movement” would be a pleasing ar¬
rangement as an exchange of labor—
a British engineer moves to France, a
French carpenter moves to the Unit¬
ed Kingdom—but is unworkable
when migration gushes all one way.

It is NATO that keeps peace in Eu¬
rope. During the slow-motion car
crash of the euro, the EU is more a
source of discord. Should the UK’s
departure prompt some soul-searching
humility, even a rethink about the
EU’s ultimate ambition to subjugate
and effectively abolish the European
nation-state, having one of its largest
and oldest members walk out could
theoretically do the high-handed cabal
a world of good.

Yet American coverage of the sur¬
prise victory for Vote Leave in the UK’s
2016 referendum was aghast. The big¬
oted barbarians had overrun Bucking¬
ham Palace with pitchforks and torches.
Curiously, my compatriots rarely con¬
sider that we’d not want our country to
join an autocratic bloc whose laws and
courts supersede our own. (Well ...
maybe we would just now.)

A UK resident for three decades, I
doggedly out myself at London dinner
parties as a Leave supporter—though
I might skate safely on the chummy
assumption that of course, as a half¬
way sane person, I backed Remain. Pm
surely pitied and deplored behind my
back, for even face-to-face I’m regarded
as an exotic if slightly repellent zoo
specimen. Declaring myself here is
bound to have the same effect or
worse. Yet perhaps, as a rare bird of a
different color amid the monochrome
flock of American columnists writing
about Brexit (“economic suicide,” ac¬
cording to Thomas Friedman), I will
at least offer up another happy occa¬
sion for recreational contempt.

I lived for a dozen years in Belfast.
Questioning daily why I gave a toss
about arcane Troubles politics, I clung
to what was really at stake: whether ter¬
rorism paid off. As I’ve watched Brexit

grind on, what seems increasingly at
stake is whether democracy pays off.

Even if EU membership is indeed an
economic advantage, is a higher GDP
worth the price: the spectacle, con¬
ducted on an international stage, of the
people’s will in a democracy coldly de¬
fied? I don’t think the answer is obvious.

W ith 73 percent of Parliament
having supported Remain
during the campaign, Brexit
has been awkward from the get-go. Par¬
liament delivered a decision to the
people. The people gave the wrong
answer. Ever since, Parliament has been
trying to take the decision back. After
all, what happens when you ask power¬
ful people to do something they don’t
want to do? They don’t do it.

The effort to subvert the electoral
verdict really took off with the inge¬
nious contrivance of the “hard” and
“soft” Brexit, when the choice on the
ballot was binary. The referendum itself
did not present the option of “leave sort
of but not really.” These textural dis¬
tinctions never arose during the cam¬
paigns, and only became common cur¬
rency once the incorrect vote was in.

As branding, the “hard” and “soft”
polarity is inspired. Softness calls up
kindness, compassion, agreeable toilet
paper, and bunny rabbits. Hardness
evokes obduracy, mercilessness, uncom¬
fortable seating, and extremism—e.g.,
“hard right.” At a stroke, anyone advo¬
cating actually leaving the European
Union —hitherto known as a Leave
voter—was an intransigent kook from
the reactionary fringe. Thus 52 percent
of the electorate was neatly exiled to
beyond the pale. Advocates of a “soft”
Brexit—such continuing entanglement
with the EU as to make the whole

EASY CHAIR

fandango of “leaving” utterly pointless—
are Remainers in Groucho glasses.

M ost Remainers have never
accepted the referendum re¬
sult. Like the American press,
British Europhiles immediately pilloried
Leavers as racist for wanting to control
their own immigration laws, though the
immigrants to whom EU membership
was germane were preponderantly
white. Critics declared that representa¬
tive democracies should never hold ref-
erendums, an argument Remainers
never advanced in the days when they
assumed they would win. Wishing the
referendum had never been run became
a form of magical thinking, as if mar¬
shaling sufficient regret could un-run
the poll. Insults hurled at Leave
voters—impugning the capacity of
these half-wits and moral misfits to
evaluate complex issues that were over
their heads—echoed historical argu¬
ments against women’s suffrage and the
enfranchisement of the working class.

Fatally for Leavers, after David Cam¬
eron fell on his sword, Conservatives
selected a party leader who’d supported
Remain, and who as prime minister
would therefore spearhead an extrac¬
tion that she didn’t believe in. Oh, to
start, Theresa May talked a good game,
eternally perseverating, “Brexit means
Brexit!”—a mantra that, tellingly, quite
vanished from her speeches by last sum¬
mer. Like the name of the lobbying
group Leave Means Leave, the tautol¬
ogy suggests insecurity over the govern¬
ment’s commitment to honoring the
referendum. Otherwise Brexit would
clearly mean Brexit, right?

The claim that British broadcasters,
not least the BBC, have consistently
displayed a Remain bias is barely even
controversial. News anchors eagerly
embraced the hard and soft paradigm,
and have constantly referred to the
UK’s departure without a deal first as
“crashing out,” a train-wreck expression
that blithely assumes the conclusion.

Pundits and politicians alike have
argued for neutering the referendum
result because Leavers didn’t have all
the facts, had been misled by their pol¬
iticians, and “didn’t know what they
were voting for”—allegations that could
probably be made about most elector¬
ates in the world. Multiple parliamen¬
tarians have asserted knowingly that

“no one voted to be poorer!”—although
when polled in 2017, more than 60 per¬
cent of Leave voters were willing to
accept “significant damage” to the Brit¬
ish economy in return for political in¬
dependence, and nearly 40 percent
would even accept losing their jobs.
Besides, if unintended consequences
were grounds for invalidating a vote,
we’d have to nullify most elections, or
simply stop bothering to hold them to
begin with.

Despite the tough “Brexit means
Brexit!” rhetoric, Theresa May sent an
ardent Remainer civil servant to negoti¬
ate with Brussels, from whose key deci¬
sions her pro-Leave “Brexit secretary”
was often excluded, and two Brexit
secretaries in a row resigned in dismay
over the direction the negotiations were
headed. At every vital juncture, she has
accepted the EU’s terms and often ludi¬
crous underlying assumptions—most
lethally, that the UK is responsible for
devising arrangements on the Irish Re¬
public’s side of its border with Northern
Ireland and that so much as a camera
on that border is the end of the world.
The resultant withdrawal deal over¬
whelmingly rejected by Parliament in
January entailed a high degree of regu¬
latory alignment, continued subjection
to the European Court of Justice, the
sacrifice of £39 billion with no strings
attached, and potential entrapment in
an EU customs union literally forever,
with no mechanism of escape beyond
“Mother, may I?” No wonder May has
also stopped reciting the aphorism from
her party’s 2017 manifesto, “No deal is
better than a bad deal.”

In the political pandemonium fol¬
lowing January’s legislative rejection of
May’s withdrawal deal, all the soft,
softer, and softest options entertained
were so close to de facto EU member¬
ship as to make the whole exercise a
farce. The one scalp the prime minister
waved to the public was an end to EU
freedom of movement. Yet among
Leave voters, only 22 percent endorsed
her deal, and 58 percent didn’t believe
it respected the referendum—belying
the notion that Leavers care solely
about immigration.

As for still another referendum, it
might sound democratic. If some voting
is good, then surely more voting is bet¬
ter? The EU has a history of making
electorates go back to the polls until

they get their minds right. But early this
year, Britons believed by 47 percent to
39 percent that a second referendum
was antidemocratic. The sole purpose of
a so-called People’s Vote—a tag both
bizarre and insulting; I’m sorry, but who
voted last time?—is to overturn the
2016 result. (Only one in eight Leavers
would countenance a do-over. Even if
Leave support were unflagging, the
question could be rigged—by splitting
the Leave vote, or by taking an authen¬
tic departure off the ballot.) It’s even
argued that because some older Leave
voters have died and younger Remain
supporters have come of age, the vote
must be run again. But that logic sets a
dodgy precedent. Close elections would
be reenacted continually if the votes of
dead people didn’t count.

Y et here’s a radical proposition:
maybe Brexit, however it ends
up, isn’t as important as it’s
made out to be. Like many a protracted
contest, Brexit long ago became crudely
about who wins. Leavers thought they
won in 2016, only to find the implemen¬
tation of that triumph entailed yet an¬
other fight. But are the consequences of
which faction prevails really so momen¬
tous? While the short term could in¬
volve disruption, in the big picture the
UK would probably manage well
enough outside the EU; England as an
independent nation goes back a thou¬
sand years, its union with Scotland
three hundred. Likewise, after partici¬
pating in the European project for forty-
seven years, the UK would endure
bravely, I dare say, through forty-eight.
Even a proper UK departure from the
EU was never going to topple the bloc.

By embracing the campaign motto
“Take Back Control,” Leavers were
chasing a feeling. Yes, they hoped to
tap the brakes on mass immigration,
but the majority of UK incomers are
from outside the EU. Leavers were more
broadly motivated to restore British
sovereignty, and so to revive national
pride and a bolshie islander indepen¬
dence. It was gratifying to refuse to vote
as they were told to.

For Remainers, the referendum was
also emotional, and also concerned
with identity. They were sophisticated
Europeans, not “Little Englanders.” (Do
my compatriots ever refer to “Little
Americans”?) Emulating the very

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

CELEBRATING 80 YEARS

haughtiness that puts their opponents
off about their friends in Brussels, Re-
mainers have been driven by a sense of
superiority, a certainty that they are
right (I’ve often allowed that on Brexit
I might be wrong; I’ve never heard a
Remainer say the same), and a disgust
that these ignorant troglodytes could be
allowed to victimize the whole popula¬
tion. Remainers have been intoxicated
by a messiah complex. Their nation’s
very survival being at stake more than
justifies attempting to overturn the big¬
gest electoral exercise in British history.

Yet as a thought experiment, let’s
give each faction what it wants.

1. The UK cuts all institutional ties
with the EU. Street parties in Leave
constituencies festoon pedestrianized
town centers with bunting. Cakes are
iced with Union Jacks. Breweries re¬
lease commemorative batches of Free¬
dom Ale. Stands hawk the tacky gilded
coffee mugs of the sort produced for
royal weddings.

But most victories are fleeting.
Once the paper flags are swept up,
most of these voters’ lives aren’t faintly
improved. They may have resented the
bureaucracy in Brussels, but the British
invented bureaucracy. Being clobbered
by regulations from Westminster (whose
tax code is twelve times the length of
the King James Bible) proves little dif¬
ferent from being hit over the head by
the EU’s common rule book. Since
tweezing EU diktats from domestic
legislation is like picking crabmeat,
Parliament keeps most EU laws on the
books anyway. Money is still tight. The
weather still sucks. Marriages still
founder. When anything subsequently
goes wrong, whether politically, logisti-
cally, or economically, Leavers get the
blame, including for what would have
gone wrong without Brexit. The party
sliding to hangover, that stirring sensa¬
tion of emancipation subsides.

Meanwhile, stewing in antipathy,
resentment, and self-pity, Remainers
plot to rejoin. Any fallout short of the
apocalypse they predicted is annoying.

2. Either BRINO (Brexit in Name
Only) is locked in or the referendum is
overturned outright. Remainers are
smug, not to mention sniffy about sub¬
mitting to so much turmoil only to
sustain the status quo. But arch self-
congratulation and palpable relief rap¬
idly evaporate. History doesn’t stand

still, and EU membership offers no safe
harbor. Another, truly epic Mediterra¬
nean migration crisis, say, may oblige
Britain to accept a large share of new
arrivals, despite a crippling shortage of
housing. Or fiscal collapse in Italy may
force the UK to help bail out foreign
banks on a ruinous scale.

But here I challenge my own thesis:

For Leavers, the perfidy kicks off na¬
tionwide consternation. As the UK
nestles back into the European fold,
dissenting commentators warn fever¬
ishly that the double cross will foster a
catastrophic breach of public trust in
democracy. These threats consistently
sound hollow, like the Big Bad Wolf
vowing to huff and puff and blow a
little pig’s house in when the abode is
made of brick. That’s what Remainers
had figured out years earlier: widespread
embitterment doesn’t matter. Democ¬
racy never works all that well; votes are
always diluted to the point of absurdity,
like the active ingredients in homeo¬
pathic cures. The populace is always
disillusioned with politicians. So big
whoop. A citizenry that doesn’t believe
in the legitimacy of its own elections
affects neither democracy nor a sham of
a democracy.

But Brexit-Schmexit might have
electoral consequences. Should the
Tories own the betrayal, incandescent
Leavers could put Jeremy Corbyn’s
Labour Party in power by default. Lo,
a Marxist prime minister poses a
graver threat to Britain’s well-being
than Brexit ever did. To accommodate
the scale of capital flight, they could
finally have to build that third runway
at Heathrow.

Yet this isn’t France. Disgruntled
voters don’t burn cars and smash up
Oxford Street. Earlier this year, the
comment pages of the Tory Telegraph
predicted that forsaken Brexiteers
would: park in the wrong place; burn
driver’s licenses; buy yellow jackets;
carry placards; cancel their BBC
television licenses; pay council tax
late (but not withhold it altogether),
or even pay the tax in person—in
pennies. Oofi-ooh.

In all probability, they don’t even
risk a parking ticket. The British are a
biddable people, easily cowed by au¬
thority. Roundly deceived, defeated
Leavers still pay their taxes on time—
no pennies. ■

CHRISTOPHER
LIGHTFOOT WALKER
READING SERIES

THU, APR 4

HALA ALYAN & ILYA KAMINSKY

TUE, APR 9

T.C. BOYLE &

AUDREYSCHULMAN

THU, APR 11

MARY SZYBIST &

CHARLES WRIGHT

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Media and Spectacle in
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the ^Il cs

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The Racial Politics of the

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By Maryann Erigha

for THE BLACK

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THE

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HARPER’S INDEX

Percentage change since 1975 in the portion of Americans who hold hunting licenses: -38
Number of states that allow roadkill to be salvaged for food : 31
Number of the twenty least prosperous US congressional districts that are represented by Republicans : 16
Of the twenty most prosperous districts that are represented by Democrats : 20
Percentage of statewide elections in the Deep South won by Republicans since 2008 : 97
Number of new Confederate statues that have been constructed on public grounds since 2015 : 1
Percentage of Southern white Americans who say the country must “protect and preserve its white European heritage” : 30

Of Southern black Americans who do : 28
Rank of Arabic among France’s most spoken languages : 2
Percentage of French students who study Arabic in secondary school: 0.2
Net loss of foreign-language programs at US colleges and universities from 2009 to 2013 : 1

From 2013 to 2016 : 651

Percentage increase from 2012 to 2017 in the number of US college graduates who major in computer science : 51

In the number of students who earn PhDs in computer science : 17
Portion of 2017 computer science PhDs who pursued work in industry rather than academia : 2/3
Factor by which graduate students are more likely to experience depression or anxiety than the general population : 6

Percentage of Indians with graduate educations who are unemployed : 16

Of Indians who are illiterate : 2

Percentage change in the value of the US market in adult fiction books from 2013 to 2017 : -16

In children’s and young-adult fiction books: +11

Factor by which Facebook users over 65 are more likely to share stories from fake news sites than users between 18 and 29 : 7
Percentage of US adult Facebook users who are unaware the company categorizes them according to their interests : 74

Of users who feel their assigned categories do not accurately describe them : 27
Percentage of Americans born before 1946 who know someone who identifies with gender-neutral pronouns: 7

Of Americans born after 1996 : 35

Number of minutes by which the average American man has more leisure time each day than the average woman : 33

Percentage of this extra time that men spend watching television : 65
Percentage of Americans who said global warming was personally important to them in the spring of 2018 : 63

In the fall of 2018: 72

Percentage of US adults in 1978 who said that the country’s levels of consumption were “immoral” : 65

Who say so today : 46

Chance that an American CEO expected global economic growth to slow last year : 1 in 50
That a CEO expects global economic growth to slow this year : 3 in 10
Average age of an American with at least $25 million in 2014 : 58

In 2018:47

Percentage of US adults who say they would rather talk about their own death than money : 57
Percentage of Americans aged 18 to 34 who say they’d like to live forever : 24

Of Americans over 55 : 13

Factor by which the rate of asteroids hitting Earth has increased over the past 290 million years : 3

Figures cited are the latest available as of February 2019. Sources are listed on page 65.
“Harper’s Index” is a registered trademark.

HARPER’S INDEX

THE #

ARMY " 4

DAVID 4
, TOSCANA

A M U it

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Translated Ky
David William Fosreir

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UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

•V

READINGS

[Discussion]

SALABLE VIRTUES

By Rony Brauman, from Humanitarian Wars?,
which will be published in April in the United King¬
dom by Hurst. Brauman, a physician, was president
of Doctors Without Borders from 1982 to 1994. This
conversation, with journalist Regis M eyran, took
place in the spring of 2017. The book was translated
from the French by Nina Friedman.

“it is impossible to formulate a general

LAW FOR INTERVENTION”

regis meyran: Let’s discuss the series of wars
conducted by the West, which the media
and politicians portrayed as “just.”
rony brauman: By “just wars” we mean wars os¬
tensibly motivated primarily by humanitarian
concerns, that is, the protection of civilian
populations: saving a population from a fam¬
ine in Somalia, an impending massacre in
Kosovo, or oppression in Afghanistan. I draw
a distinction between these and other wars or
military operations fought in the name of se¬
curity, such as the war in Afghanistan be¬
tween 2001 and 2002 or in Iraq since 2013.
meyran: Why is the idea of “just war,” in itself,
a problem?

brauman: Because, while claiming to protect
populations, the United Nations is rehabilitat¬
ing war—when in fact it was created to prevent
it. And in granting itself the right to declare
war and to call it “just,” the UN is acting as
both referee and player, and legalizing the con¬
flation of judges and parties to a conflict.

I reject the very notion of just war as a
contradiction in terms; war is a he, war is
hell—it can never be just. But unless I want¬
ed to take a radical pacifist position—which
I respect but do not share—I feel it necessary

to understand the exceptions, that is, the sit¬
uations in which war might be justified, and
on what terms.

meyran: A just war is based, legally, on the “re¬
sponsibility to protect”; can you explain what
that phrase means?

brauman: Basically, the legitimacy of the use
of force rests on the seriousness of the
threat, on its being used only as a last resort,
and on the proportionality of the response.
There one would find, together with “rea¬
sonable chance of success,” the classic crite¬
ria for just war that have been around since
Thomas Aquinas.

“Legitimate authority” and “proportionality
of the response” are legal in nature, falling un¬
der international law. The other two criteria
are far more interesting to me, because they are
more political, or politico-ethical. How much
violence can one tolerate while hoping to stop
it by nonviolent means? The questions of “last
resort” and of “reasonable chance of success”
imply an ability to calculate the final outcome.
As the political theorist Michael Walzer re¬
minds us, “The object in war is a better state
of peace”—that is, a more secure situation
than what existed before. And there lies the
crux of the problem: How do we define suc¬
cess? We all remember the infamous “Mission
Accomplished” of George W. Bush, dressed up
as a pilot and posing on an aircraft carrier, af¬
ter the fall of Baghdad. And we know what
happened after that.

In a public debate on the right to inter¬
vene, political scientist Pierre Hassner cited
two contradictory ideas from the Prussian
general Carl von Clausewitz: On one hand,
no sensible person would start a war without a
clear idea of what they hope to accomplish
with the war and how they want to conduct
it. On the other hand, because of friction, the
fog of war, and changing means leading to

READINGS

changing objectives, no war ends as originally
planned. These two ideas, synthesized by
Hassner, sum up the inherent practical con¬
tradiction whenever one goes to war, whether
humanitarian or not: while a clear idea of the
ends and the means is essential, the unfore¬
seen dynamics of the war make that impossi¬
ble. He infers from this that it is impossible to
formulate a general law of armed interven¬
tion, but argues that the question needs to be
asked in particular situations.

That is to say, a war’s “reasonable chances
of success” are impossible to assess when the
stated aims are vague and general—like de¬
mocracy, women’s liberation, general well¬
being, and so forth. Or as Walzer more
bluntly puts it, “foreign intervention, if it is a
brief affair, cannot shift the domestic bal¬
ance of power in any decisive way toward the
forces of freedom, while if it is prolonged ...
it will itself pose the greatest possible threat
to the success of those forces.” They can,
however, be assessed when the aims are pre¬
cise and narrow—like destroying terrorist
training camps, as the United States did in
Afghanistan in 2001.

“it turned into a war for civilization”

meyran: The United States claimed Afghani¬
stan was a moral war. Perhaps we should
distinguish between the various phases of
that conflict.

brauman: Indeed. It was hard to argue with
the United States’ initial response after the
September 11 attacks, because an attack
like that cannot go unanswered. But two
objectives were mixed up at the outset:
overthrowing the Taliban regime in Kabul,
and destroying A1 Qaeda training camps.
The terrorist organization, a legitimate tar¬
get, was wrongly identified with the Afghan
government—which, though it did allow A1
Qaeda to set up shop in the country, was
not involved in the attacks. The Afghan
Taliban—which is not a political party but
a kind of relatively diversified front—is an
organization of nationalists, first and fore¬
most. Islamic nationalists, admittedly, but
not international jihadis. They do use ter¬
rorism, that’s indisputable, but only within
their own borders and against an identified
local enemy.

During the first phase of the American in¬
vasion in Afghanistan, an international law
enforcement operation in 2001 and 2002,
American forces destroyed a substantial por¬
tion of A1 Qaeda’s infrastructure in Afghani¬
stan. Although they missed bin Laden, they
were able to hunt for him using law enforce¬

ment methods, as pointed out by the many
politicians and specialists criticizing the very
notion of a war on terror at that time. And
as you no doubt remember, the US Depart¬
ment of Defense dubbed the operation “Op¬
eration Infinite Justice,” before renaming it
“Operation Enduring Freedom.” After a start
like that, it’s no surprise that what followed
looked like a war for civilization.

meyran: But how did the hunt for A1 Qaeda
leaders turn into a war for civilization?

brauman: The Taliban fell six weeks after the
offensive began, and an interim govern¬
ment led by Hamid Karzai was installed in
late 2001. Foreign forces could have begun
to withdraw at that point, leaving the Af¬
ghan people to find their own political solu¬
tion, but the opposite occurred. Foreign
contingents were beefed up, NATO was de¬
ployed under the appellation ISAF (Inter¬
national Security Assistance Force), and
magical concepts that had emerged in the
1990s arrived in force: state-building,
confidence-building, nation-building, peace¬
building, and so on. Roads, bridges, and
schools were constructed, young people
were trained, and hospitals were renovated.
The pacificatory expeditionary force con¬
tinued to grow throughout the decade, cre¬
ating a flourishing market for private securi¬
ty companies. But it was no obstacle to the
Taliban’s seemingly inexorable advance.
The numerous military blunders and hun¬
dreds of resulting deaths, the colonialist be¬
havior, the onerous American tutelage, the
double-dealing of Pakistan and Saudi Ara¬
bia, the pervasive corruption, and the hos¬
tility created everywhere by the continuing
presence of foreign armies are enough to ex¬
plain the success of the Islamist rebellion.
Everyone in that expat world—humanitari¬
an workers, consultants, civilian members
of the various international organizations,
and mercenaries—all of them were well
aware that ultimately, in one way or another,
the Taliban would return to power.

“do you want someone cutting off your
daughter’s arm?”

meyran: So how did the US government get
France, for example, to agree to the war, in a
context of likely defeat and military deaths?

brauman: Women’s rights became a favorite
rationalization over the course of time. In
the early 2000s, the intellectual and politi¬
cal context was suddenly repolarized by a
new global enemy, jihadism. In France there
were fiery debates over the “veil” and “Islam
and the Republic,” with the September 11

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

The Time Vivarium-97, a work on paper by Sun Xun, whose work is on view this month at ShanghART Gallery, in Singapore.

attacks as a backdrop. The secular Republic—
as defended by Sarkozy, Hollande, and then
Vails, along with numerous intellectuals
and editorial writers—conveniently united
the fight against Islamist obscurantism in
France with that in Afghanistan. It was a
matter of liberating women from their
“cloth prison”—an oft-used expression—
while fighting for our security against ter¬
rorism. Another double brainwashing. And
it goes without saying that no one in Af¬
ghanistan was attempting to free women
from their veils.

meyran: Was France a participant in this moral
crusade to impose Western values by force?

brauman: In a word, yes. France’s military in¬
volvement—intended primarily, it seems to
me, to please our US allies so they would for¬
give our opposition to the invasion of Iraq—
had to be cloaked in other, more salable, vir¬
tues. There was security, of course, but the
Taliban posed no credible threat to France or

to Europe. More was needed, and the unify¬
ing theme of “France’s universal values”—
the values it’s up to us to share and spread
throughout the world—fit the bill.

Nicolas Sarkozy illustrated the barbaric
treatment of women in several interviews,
claiming that women wearing nail polish
were having their arms cut off by the Tali¬
ban. I don’t know where he got that story,
since no one ever asked him—in any of the
interviews I saw, in any case. But the mo¬
ment I heard it, it reminded me of the ru¬
mor that was around during the Vietnam
War that the Vietcong were cutting off the
arms of children vaccinated by the US Army.
The French accused the Germans of some¬
thing similar during World War I, but few
were apparently struck by that similarity,
either, and despite the hyperbole—“Do you
want someone cutting off your wife’s or
daughter’s arm? I don’t!”—the story was taken
at face value. Journalists and legislators

READINGS

were rightly worried about the stalemate
and the losses, and more generally about
the impasse in which the foreign forces
found themselves, but they seemed igno¬
rant of the fact that even that final justifi¬
cation for our presence was based only on a
worn-out piece of propaganda.

meyran: Walking such a fine line isn’t easy:
on one side, criticizing Western lies, and,
on the other, acknowledging the Taliban’s
terrible violence.

brauman: I’m not arguing with the fact that
women are oppressed in Afghanistan, but
rather with using it to justify our military
presence, as if military power was a response
to male violence.

I think it’s completely reasonable to use
the condition of women—and gay people,
as well—as a marker of democracy, provided
it is applied everywhere. Would we consider
invading India, or imposing sanctions on
it, on the grounds that it’s one of the most
dangerous countries in the world for women,
with its female infanticide, forced marriage,
dowry crime, and rape? In Mexico, mass
killings, sex crimes, and mutilations of wom¬
en have all reached frightening proportions
since the cartel wars began, but no one
would think of sending an expeditionary

[Review]

SOUTHERN FAN

From descriptions, published in a music review by
Texas senator John Cornyn, of Neil Young’s 1972
album Harvest. The article was printed in Febru¬
ary of that year in the Trinitonian, the newspaper
of Trinity University, in Texas, where Cornyn was
a student.

Is genuine
Is polished
Is multifaceted
Contains simple tunes
Contains surprising orchestrations
Contains lyrics that drive listeners crazy
Reveals Young’s nature
Reveals Young’s previously hidden emotions
Dwells on the futility of Young’s relationships
with the opposite sex

Indicates that Young has been shafted by more
women than any man alive

force there to sort things out. The fact re¬
mains that people never talk about vio¬
lence against women as much as when it
happens in a Muslim country. And yet we
treat these issues differently when they oc¬
cur in countries that are allies, such as
Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf coun¬
tries, or in conflict situations such as in
regard to Iran and Afghanistan. In
France, a woman is killed by her spouse
every three days, and there are tens of
thousands of rapes each year, yet we don’t
blame such horrors on our country’s domi¬
nant Catholic culture.

“brainwashing is part and parcel of

MODERN WARFARE”

meyran: Is there a total disconnect between
the moral justification for the war in Af¬
ghanistan and its true political reasons?

brauman: Yes. The fundamental reason
France got involved—and not just France—
was to be at the Americans’ side. Political
analyst Bertrand Badie showed how France
became pro-NATO after the Iraq War. It was
to demonstrate our solidarity, even if it
meant getting bogged down in what was
quickly becoming an absurd war. But since
those were not convincing enough reasons
for the public, whose support is required in a
democracy, an incontrovertible moral justifi¬
cation had to be given. Nothing new there;
brainwashing is part and parcel of modern
warfare, so we’re on familiar ground.

meyran: But when you think about the logic
behind these moral wars—about wanting
to create a state ex nihilo, about wanting to
impose an ideology with little regard for
reality, all via having a strong army and
waging war—doesn’t that reflect a problem
in terms of democracy as well? Can a true
democracy behave like that? Political jour¬
nalists in the mainstream media can’t
point out contradictions in speeches or
identify ideological problems; often, they
shut up altogether with an all-powerful
head of state. Isn’t that a failure of democ¬
racy as well?

brauman: No doubt, but in the sense that a
hospital-acquired infection is a failure by
the hospital, or in the sense of pharmacons,
where remedy and poison are inextricably
linked. Democracy is precious because it’s a
political system that incorporates the idea of
its own imperfection, and thus the utility
of criticism.

The historian Marc Bloch spoke of World
War I as “an immense experiment in social
psychology.” Fake news can only survive “on

14 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

Photographs of toys made by children in the Bidi Bidi refugee settlement, Uganda, by Nora Lorek.

one condition: that it finds a favorable cuh
tural broth-In it,” he adds, “people un¬

consciously express all their prejudices, ha¬
treds, fears, all of their strong emotions.”
Again, unique—and therefore unpredictable—
circumstances are always required in order
for those emotions to result in decisions as
grave as going to war.

meyran: While Bloch studied false news from
war, we were dealing with far more than that
with something like the supposed weapons
of mass destruction the United States said
were in Iraq: an enormous lie of international
proportions. I find it astonishing that the
vast majority of the Western world swal¬
lowed a lie like that.

brauman: No, the entire Western world—the
entire world, in fact—denied it. You have
to remember the protests all over the world,
and in Western Europe in particular. Not
always for the right reasons, at first, if you
think about international polling showing
that a significant portion of the world’s
population thought that the September 11
attacks were a CIA fabrication. But the

propaganda worked admirably in the United
States, where more than half of the popula¬
tion supported the “preemptive war”
against a “new Hitler.”

That said, the war—the disastrous re¬
percussions of which we’re still living with
today—would not have been possible with¬
out Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “I’ll be
with you, whatever” promise to George
W. Bush, against the advice of the British
people who, like the French and other Eu¬
ropeans, were opposed to it. Echoing the
WMD theme, he reported having “infor¬
mation” that Iraq could deploy those
WMD within forty-five minutes, which
made neutralizing them seem like an emer¬
gency. The UK sent forty-five thousand
soldiers to Iraq, a significant military con¬
tribution, and made the war politically fea¬
sible by ending US isolation on the issue. I
would also note that the British Parlia¬
ment conducted a lengthy investigation
and in 2016 published an extremely de¬
tailed report—over six thousand pages—
highly critical of Britain’s involvement in

READINGS

Iraq. We’re still waiting for its French coun¬
terpart to do the same for France’s military
engagements. Blair was profoundly shaken
by this, however, and responded to the
criticism by defending his decision: “I be¬
lieve we made the right decision and the
world is better and safer.”

meyran: And have moral wars based on lies
made the world any safer? I’m not sure
about that....

brauman: I can’t help thinking that the world
would be safer had those responsible for its
safety—I’m speaking, ironically of course,
about the permanent members of the Secu¬
rity Council—not charged headlong into
these foolhardy ventures. As we speak,
Donald Trump is announcing an increase
in American troop levels in Afghanistan,
where 31,000 Afghan civilians and 2,400
American soldiers have died since October
2001—an appalling toll, in addition to
more than 20,000 civilians wounded and
nearly a trillion dollars spent. While I am
sure that Trump couldn’t care less about the
just war doctrine, this does show that a war
that could be initially labeled a just re¬
sponse to aggression was continued under
another pretext—that is, “civilization.”

[History]

OCCIDENTS HAPPEN

From the opening lines of chapters in A Short

History of Europe, by Simon Jenkins, published in

March by PublicAffairs Books.

It helps to be a god. As Zeus gazed along the
Phoenician shore, his eye fell on a fair princess
named Europa playing on the beach.

If Greece was founded by a princess raped by
a bull, Rome was founded by a baby suckled
by a she-wolf.

From the moment of Diocletian’s division of
the Roman Empire, Europe moved into a
state of transition.

The old imperial heartland of Italy, new home
to the defeated Ostrogoths, now lay open to
anarchy and invasion.

The concentration of power on which Char¬
lemagne’s empire relied went into decline.

The emperor approached the pope with a
plea to heal the now forty-year-old Great
Schism. He was desperate.

The pope intended Christian Europe to be an
empire of the spirit under his command. But

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY, CHICAGO

though Europe might devote its soul to the ser¬
vice of one master, the church, its body was in
the service of others, kings and emperors.

The church was aware of its critics.

The Renaissance and the Reformation were pro¬
cesses as well as periods.

The rulers of medieval Europe acquired legiti¬
macy through force of arms.

The princes left Europe’s conflicts unresolved.

France faced what the best-known student of its
politics, Alexis de Tocqueville, called “the most
dangerous moment for a bad government ...
when it sets about reform.”

The French Revolution lasted barely five years,
but it shook Europe to the core. It witnessed in
turn representative government, mob rule, ter¬
ror, collapse, and eventually dictatorship.

The failures of the reformist upheavals may
have disappointed revolutionaries, but they
galvanized ideologues.

Memoirs of the turn of the twentieth century
dwell on Indian summers and imperial au¬
tumns. They list moments when a bold states¬
man, a wise decision, or sheer luck might have
averted the forthcoming tragedy. In retro¬
spect, the period was one of self-satisfaction
and overconfidence, but its starkest feature
was a lack of leadership.

The Versailles Treaty was a low point in Europe¬
an diplomacy. It left resentment throughout
Germany and bitterness that others were not
sharing their war guilt.

The start of the Second World War was like an
opening in a game of chess—predictable.

Europe confronted a bald fact. A continent
that fifty years earlier had confidently ruled
a third of the world’s population had torn
itself to pieces.

The world watched mesmerized as the once-
mighty Soviet Empire gave a sigh, tottered, and
collapsed. It vanished.

[Anomalies]

COME AS YOU ARE

From accounts of nonsexual orgasms documented
in “Orgasm Range and Variability in Humans: A
Content Analysis.” The study was published in the
International Journal of Sexual Health in No -
vember of last year.

I had eight or ten during labor with my first child.

Breastfeeding. I can’t even look at women who
are breastfeeding now because it brings me

back that feeling. If I have any more children, I
don’t think I’ll be able to breastfeed them.

I had one once passing a kidney stone.

When I get a tattoo. I’m pretty sure my artist
knows.

I have orgasmed when my cats have climbed on
my lower back and kneaded my skin and
purred. I’ve always felt very weird about that,
and it doesn’t happen often because I don’t let
them lie on me like that anymore.

I’ve had them after a bad sunburn, when my back
is peeling in the spot I can’t reach, and my boy¬
friend peels my skin off for me.

I can orgasm from itching a mosquito bite or
athlete’s foot.

I once stuck my feet out the window of a moving
car. The wind tickled them and I had a orgasm.

Walking barefoot on unfinished or weathered
wood always makes me orgasm.

[Poem]

AMERICA

By Solmaz Sharif from a manuscript in progress.
Sharif’s previous collection of poetry, Look, was
published in 2016 by Gray wolf Press.

I had
to. I

learned it.

It was
if. If

was nice.

I said
sure. One
more thing.

One more
thing. Eat
it said.

It felt
good. I
was dead.

I learned
it. I

had to.

READINGS 17

Using a head scratcher, the kind with a lot of
little flexible arms. I bought one when I was
depressed.

Swabbing my ears. Most days I’d rather do that
than have sex.

I came while cutting a guy’s mohawk in my bath-
room. Wasn’t into the guy.

At a musical-theater conference, someone was
singing “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables,” and I
was listening and enjoying. When he hit the
high note, I came.

Deftones’ “You’ve Seen the Butcher” in concert
caused one of the most intense orgasms I’ve
had. Other Deftones, Silversun Pickups, Jimi
Hendrix, Tricky, and Nine Inch Nails songs
also get the same response.

Whenever I dance or even listen to club music.
Best part is, I work in a nightclub.

Eating a perfectly ripe cherry tomato.

I’ve had one eating really good, really rich choco¬
late—sometimes cupcakes, sometimes chocolate
bars. I call them “chocogasms.”

Every time I eat tuna—something about the tex¬
ture in my mouth.

When using a balloon whisk and vigorously beat¬
ing egg whites until they form soft peaks. One of
the less obvious pleasures of home baking.

I’m a bag handler for a major airline, and some¬
times, when I’m in the bottom bin of an air¬
plane, stacking people’s bags, I get a very intense
orgasm while I’m mid-lift of a bag. It’s extremely
embarrassing if someone is in the bin with me
because I yell out and can’t move my arms while
it happens. They always think I’ve hurt my back.

Every time the flight I’m on takes off. Or if I can
hear a flight take off.

When I was talking to my best friend late at
night. There was a pause in the conversation
and I looked at her and immediately started
to orgasm.

Painting has given me the best orgasms. I started
art school two years ago, and I don’t paint any¬
more because it’s too sexual for me.

I was caught shoplifting in a major retail store.
They sat me on a bench inside the store’s little
spy room, and I was terrified. The security

guard started asking questions, but the moment
he said he was going to call the cops, I was sur¬
prised by a big orgasm.

During my AP Statistics test in high school. The
proctor told me I had five minutes left and I came.

While reading a letter of recommendation for grad
school. I also cried. It was from my favorite professor.

At the culmination of a terribly good novel. It
was a classic, horror-based Stephen King.

I once had an orgasm in a grocery store checkout
line while reading Stephen King's On Writing. He
said something beautiful and thought-provoking.
And bam!

[Fiction]

THE INDIRECT WORLD

By Clarice Lispector, from The Besieged City, a
novel that will be published this month by New
Directions. Lispector’s novel The Chandelier
was published last year by New Directions. Ed -
ited by Benjamin Moser and translated from the
Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz■

O one of his final business trips, instead
of leaving his wife on Market Street, Mateus
rented the little house on the island for her,
hoping the sea would give her some color.

At the first excuse, because of a missing
cheese, Lucrecia Neves Correia had fought
with the maid and dismissed her. And finally—
alone with her former careful way of living—
she’d notice each creak of wood, keep an eye on
the roses growing in the garden, do quick laps,
and give sharp cries of recognition. At night
the cut roses would dimly illuminate the bed¬
room and leave the woman sleepless; the waters
beating on the distant beach wanted to trans¬
port her but the croaking of frogs was monitor¬
ing her from close by.

She’d fall asleep watchful as if dawn could
find the house surrounded by horses. And it
would resemble the first night of
sleep after someone was buried.

he spider had already woven several webs in
the window when the woman headed down the
road that would take her to the center of town.

At dusk, tired of walking around, she saw fi¬
nally Doctor Lucas’s office open and from it a

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

man emerge with a heavy gait. He seemed to
her quite aged yet as calm as she’d remembered
him. The woman quickly crossed the sidewalk
and stood before him laughing quietly.

In the half-darkness she didn’t see his sur¬
prise but heard his muffled voice mumbling her
name, and she grew serious for still being that
person they could call: Lucrecia Neves from
Sao Geraldo.

They took a walk through the city park. The
doctor was pointing out to her the public mon¬
uments ... and from afar the sanatorium where
his wife now lived, forcing him to relocate his
practice to the island.

Lucrecia was strolling beside him, the small
city darkening dizzily, the lights finally came
on. The doctor even ended up buying her a lit¬
tle bag of bonbons, Lucrecia was looking un¬
easily at the dark sky.

She spoke to him of Mateus, of the house on
Market Street, in the night that the sea was fill¬
ing with salt, but nothing was reaching its own
end, the breeze was bringing and taking away the
words and the lampposts were being deformed in
the water.

Doctor Lucas, calm as a man who really
worked. It was somehow humiliating to real¬
ize that, strong and hardly talkative, he was
neither revealing nor concealing himself.

When he went to assist her with her coat, and
while he was brushing his arm across her
shoulders—for just an instant Lucrecia Neves
leaned back ... had he made her arms more
lively? had he noticed? or was she imagining it?
Out of uncertainty the hazy light of a lamppost
lit up, the instant turning gold in the night, out
of uncertainty and delight the little lady was breath¬
ing, observing severely the car that was moving
ahead over the irregular stones: the wheels were
screeching and Doctor Lucas was speaking about
what he’d done that day, she interrupting him
with her errant mouth:

“Doctor Lucas, Doctor Lucas, you work too
much, sir!” she was saying taking the opportu¬
nity to touch his clothes.

The doctor, with tired and vibrant eyes, was
laughing at her....

“Ah!” mumbled the woman.

“What happened ...”

“That star,” she said with tears in her eyes
in a sincerity that, in search of expression, was
making her lie. “It’s just that I turned around
and saw the star,” she said, bathed by the
grace of her lie.

This time the doctor looked at her through
the darkness.

She blushed. But he was also looking at her with
understanding and strength, leading her now
with a first firmness through the dark lane, and
avoiding touching her.

A moment more and, not touching, they
were both thrown off balance, not touching
was almost bringing them to a certain ex¬
treme point. Everything had become precious
as if Lucrecia Neves Correia were holding
such heavy things with her left hand: a low
branch almost undid the bun in her hair,
stealing from her a slightly painful exclama¬
tion of rapture.

“See,” he said with clarity and strength, “on
such a lovely night I’ll have to work”—through
the darkness he was looking at her, imposing
on her, severely, a more dignified attitude ...

“... Impossible!” she yelled, shattered, her
happy chest lighting up without paying atten¬
tion to the man’s warning. “Impossible to work
so much,” she added foolishly.

“Can you see all right?” asked the doctor
imperiously.

He wanted to take responsibility for what he
had unleashed, and did he look guilty? She
obeyed with her mouth half-open.

“Here we are”—the jammed door was cracking
open and the man smiled—“did the walk do you
any good?” he asked in another tone.

“It did, doctor.”

[Performance Review]

TURNDOWN SERVICE

From reviews, published on TripAdvisor, of the Henn-
na Hotel, a robot-run resort in Japan that laid off more
than half its automated workforce in January.

Henn-na bills itself as a hotel staffed by robots
You get greeted by two dinosaur robots
The dinosaur says “thank you”

The baggage check is a robotic arm
Your bartender is on an iPad
Robo-vacuums clean the carpets
A robot carries the luggage
Churi is this silly doll on the nightstand that
starts talking

At first it is exciting communicating with Churi

Churi is a native Japanese robot

Churi doesn’t understand

Churi is kind of a hassle

Churi is not cooperative

During the night Churi becomes creepy

Churi says, “Hi! Are you talking to me?”

You ask Churi to be quiet
Churi keeps talking

READINGS

Was the doctor angry? The frogs were
croaking hoarsely.

“I don’t know how to thank you, doctor ... ”
—she was speaking with effort, with an ardor
slightly out of place, her hair fluttering.

“Don’t thank me then,” he responded curtly.

Oh how annoyed he was!

“Yes, doctor.”

Through the darkness dimly illuminated by
the proximity of the sea, he looking at her now
curious, almost amused—finally smiling:

“Well then, good night, get some rest.”

He reached out his hand thinking to meet hers
and accidentally touched her arm—she blanched:
“Good night,” she answered, and the man walked
off stepping on leaves.

She went into the house and turned on the
light. Inside everything was lightweight, blown.
The bed, the table, the lamp. Nothing could be
touched—the slight and upright extremities in
the wind. Why don’t I go over and touch them?
she couldn’t and yawned, shivery.

Then she changed clothes and lay down. A
gentle joy was already starting to circulate in her
blood with the first warmth, her teeth were once
again sharpening and her nails hardening, her
heart finally becoming precise in beats hard and
curt. She, succumbing to an extreme fatigue that
no man would love. Fatigue and remorse and
horror, insomnia that the lighthouse was haunt'
ing in silence.

She didn’t want to take the path of love, it would
be a tooTloody reality, the rats—the lighthouse lit
her in a flash and revealed the unknown face of lust.

She started losing her mind imagining a con¬
versation in which Doctor Lucas would seem
even more severe, she even humbler, asking him,
to buy time, a thousand questions that would be
a dance around him, destined to confound the
man’s strength: Sir, do you like big houses? sir,
do you believe in me? if I were about to die would
you save me, sir? do you speak many languages,
sir? that’s wonderful! and quickly showing him
her things: here’s my house for the time being,
this city looks so much like Sao Geraldo! That’s
my window.

So much shyness didn’t come from shame, it
came from beauty, from fear, she back again with
the great frogs.

But suddenly humble, hard: I’ll give you my
life and nothing more. Doctor Lucas, one
couldn’t make up the expression he’d have just
then, crying out: I want less than your life, I
want you! She responding with pain, with mod-
esty: When it comes to love it’s undignified to
ask for so little, buddy.

Once the tensest moment of the night had
passed, some streak of humidity was finally bro¬
ken, the waves were beating softly. The woman
nodded off and Doctor Lucas mumbled a bit ri¬

diculously with his somber face: so you don’t
know how to be free. And her answering: ah, I
can’t, you know, and she ended up free,

T i so much that she fell asleep.

he next day she was waiting for him on
the sidewalk in front of his office.

When he saw her he stopped short with the key
in his hand, his lips pressed tight. He was irritated.

But she was looking at him, patient, modest;
night was falling.

Without speaking Lucas closed the door of his
office and they went off together. They were
walking around the small city immersed in shadow.
The woman would sometimes walk ahead, and
Doctor Lucas would stop. She’d then go on ahead,
fatigued in the park, making sure with a quick
glance that he was still observing her; she’d go
on, stumble, lean in perdition on the stone eagles,
running her fingers over the reliefs— He was
watching, mute—while Lucrecia Neves was dis¬
playing herself, trying to make herself understood
in the only way she had to speak, displaying with
monotonous perseverance; he becoming a harder
man while watching—she carrying on silently,
spinning around in front of him, working him
with patience in order to form her counterpart
in this world, looking at the low sky.

They went on. He belonging to his wife
while, without getting discouraged, Lucrecia
Neves was spinning around him; and the more the
man was catching on, the more inscrutable he was
becoming. Sometimes the woman would realize he
was feeling the urge to get rid of her, he was so an¬
noyed. But she’d keep on gently provoking him,
with a resignation that would sometimes make her
think she’d been walking in the dust for years with¬
out a single breeze to bring relief to the air. She was
very tired. Eventually there was established between
them at last a short and brusque relationship whose
possibilities they wouldn’t know how to measure:
Lucas would take out a cigarette, she’d remove with
insufferable gentleness the lighter from his hand,
Lucas holding back a movement of repulsion; she’d
light the small flame, conquering him, he, con¬
quered but increasingly gruff: when she’d give him
back the lighter, they’d go on.

One night they were standing on the hill.
The dawn took on a sharp stained-glass tone;
he with his dark face.

It was at this time that Lucas began to be scared.
When the light of the lighthouse would pass over
them, it revealed two unknown faces. Lucrecia
Neves unknown, yes, but at peace, concentrated
on her utmost surface. Sometimes a rapid contrac¬
tion would pass over her face as if a fly had landed
upon it. Then she’d move her hooves, patient. He
unknown but already anxious, looking around,
placing his hand on the trunk of the chestnut...
Then Lucrecia placed her hand on the trunk of

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ADDIS FINE ART, ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA

Spectrum of Life I, a painting by Tizta Berhanu, whose work was on view in March at Addis Fine Art, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

the chestnut. Through the tree Lucrecia was
touching him. The indirect world.

Loving him, returning to the necessity of that
gesture that was pointing things out and, with the
same single movement, creating whatever there
was of the unknown inside them—all of her was
on the verge of that gesture when she was touch-
ing the trunk his hand was touching—just as
she’d looked at a household object in order to
reach the city: humble, touching whatever she
could. For the first time she was tempting him
through herself, and through the overvaluation
of that small part of individuality that until
now had not surpassed itself nor brought her to
love of herself. But now, with a final effort she
was tempting solitude. Solitude with a man: with
a final effort, she was loving him.

Then she returned by the footpaths
that were dawning.

f ucas finally said it was impossible.

Lucrecia was shocked as if unaware what this
was all about, and he, seeing so much fake inno¬
cence, got mad. The woman started to cry, softly
at first—she really did seem surprised by his
haste—saying she’d been forever wounded, that

everything had been ruined forever, though
both hardly knew what “everything” she was re¬
ferring to; that she’d expected from him “some
enormous thing, oh Doctor Lucas,” and that he’d
wounded her forever, she was repeating amid
tears and syllables swallowed by sobs. The man
was looking at her with brutality, seeing her cry¬
ing mixing up her words; she seemed pure and
puritan. He said severely like a doctor: calm
down. The weeping subsided immediately. She
wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

But without tears she was horrible to look at.
Her mouth so painted. Her face in the darkness
was anonymous, repugnant, fantastic. The doc¬
tor fell silent confronted with this truth that had
taken, to the surprise of his eyes, the form of a
face. He wanted to ask how he’d wounded her but
this no longer mattered; when he saw her face
without disguise he knew he’d wounded her some¬
how. He also noticed that the woman hadn’t
complained about any single fact. Except about
himself, which was as vague as it was serious and
accusatory; he’d been struck.

Lucrecia was now keeping absent in the shadow,
he couldn’t see her nor did he know whom to address
when he said in an empty and dry tone:

READINGS

“I don’t know what I’m to blame for but I ask
forgiveness.”—-The light of the lighthouse revealed
them so quickly that they couldn’t see each
other.—“I ask forgiveness for not being a ‘star’ or
‘the sea’”—he said ironically—“or for not being
something that gives itself,” he said blushing. “I
ask forgiveness for not knowing how to give myself
even to myself—until now I’ve only been asked for
kindness—but never to ...—in order to give my-
self in this way I’d lose my life if necessary—but
again I ask forgiveness, Lucrecia: I don’t know how
to lose my life.”

It had been his longest speech to date, and
the most embarrassing. He’d spoken with diffi¬
culty and now was withdrawing into the dark.
Was he understanding, more than she did,
that Lucrecia might have been wanting just a
gesture? asking for a feeling and nothing more?

He was hardly feeling the humidity of the
night; he was walking serious, without future.

And Lucrecia too ... but no, beneath her fu¬
tility she was working with time running out as
in war. He wasn’t feeling sorry for himself or for
Lucrecia. He was calm, strong. Which hadn’t
stopped Lucrecia from rattling him, making
him wonder now where his own guilt lay.
Which became so great that there was no lon¬
ger any punishment.

Individual life? The dangerous thing is that
each person was dealing with centuries.

His awareness was still making him at least
hide the joy of being alone. Now, however, it
was no longer a question of protecting himself.
It was a question of losing himself until reaching
the minimum of himself, throbbing spot that Lu¬
crecia Neves had almost awoken—and at last
he’d no longer need to be anonymous in order to
conceal his pride, at last, maybe, he’d no longer
need to be such a good doctor.

What to make of Lucrecia, what to make of
his wife who was embroidering in the sanatorium
and would ask for red thread and lift her head
hopefully when her husband arrived. And of
Lucrecia? Some tiny emphasis seemed to be Lu-
crecia’s only destiny, vehemence her only
strength. Even before dying she was one of the
raptured souls who even a tough man inhales
in the air of the nights.

And Lucrecia’s, was that the true surrendered
life? the one that gets lost, the waves that rise furi¬
ously over the rocks, the mortal fragrance of
flowers—and there was the sweet evil, the boul¬
ders now submerged by the waves, and in Lucre¬
cia’s innocence was evil, she waiting far away in
the wind from the hill, waiting, sweet, dizzying,
with her impure breath of roses, her neck crush-
able by one of his hands—she, waiting for him to
heed at last the plea of the waves over the rocks
and, leaping over the tallest escarpment of the
night, unleash a howl, the long neigh with which

he’d respond to the beauty and perdition of this
world: Who hadn’t seen on windless nights how
cruel and murderous the silver flowers were?

He wanted to reply, no longer to Lucrecia
who was calling him—quickly he’d surpassed
her, and if he were to speak he’d finally have
managed to reply to a Venetian blind flapping
in the silence of a street, to a mirror that re¬
flects, to everything that up till now we leave
without an answer.

He’d waited his whole life for the moment in
which he’d finally be lost.

He stopped again. The lighthouse was scan¬
ning the dark sky. Lucrecia’s immobilized smile
was passing through the clouds ...

But he didn’t go back. He went ahead tough,
a conqueror, heading toward the city that was
the shelter of his strength. The closer he drew
to the lights, the more he was

T t vanquishing Lucrecia.

he next day the doctor had hardly
worked, awaiting the moment in which he’d
see if the woman was still waiting for him in
front of his office or if she’d disappeared. But
with sudden horror and sudden joy—he
found her. Standing, modest, smiling with
her animal patience.

Their sleepwalking strolls began anew. And
when late at night they stopped upon the hill,
she said:

“Fortunately everything is impossible,” and
started scratching at the ground with the tip of her
shoe. “Because I think I’d hurt the one I loved,”
she added gently and without pride.

“What do I care how you’d hurt me,” he said,
irritated.

She immediately halted her small kicks in
the dirt.

Dazed, almost recoiling, she was wondering
how it was possible for him to love her with¬
out knowing her, forgetting that she herself
knew no more of the man than the love he
was giving her.

It seemed to her pointless to talk. Because all of
a sudden on the hill beside him, calm love seemed
to be pointing out all things like the gesture. Ever
since she started loving him she’d found simply the
sign of fate she’d sought for so long, that irreplace¬
able substance that you barely suspected in things,
the irreplaceableness of death: like the gesture,
love was being reduced until reaching the irre¬
placeable, with love you could point out the world.
She was lost.

“Let’s stay friends,” said the man who also
didn’t know how to speak and who for that reason
needed to be forgiven.

“Friends?” mumbled the woman in soft sur¬
prise, “but we were never friends”—she breathed
with pleasure—“we’re enemies, my love, forever.”

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

“View Park , Number I” a photograph by Janna Ireland , whose work is on view this month at Antenna , in New Orleans .

Courtesy the artist

READINGS

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CRITICISM

LIKE THIS OR DIE

The fate of the book review in the age of the algorithm

By Christian Lorentzen

Alex and Wendy love culture.

It’s how they spend their free
time. It’s what they talk about
at dinner parties. When they go
jogging or to the gym, they lis¬
ten to podcasts on their
phones. On Sunday nights
they watch their favorite new
shows. They go to the movies
sometimes, but they were
bummed out when MoviePass
went south, so now they mostly
stream things. They belong to
book clubs that meet every
couple of weeks. Alex and
Wendy work hard at their jobs,
but they always have a bit of
time to check their feeds at
work. What’s in their feeds?

Their feeds tell them about
culture. Their feeds are a form
of comfort. Their feeds explain
things to them that they al¬
ready understand. Their feeds tell
them that everyone else is watching,
reading, listening to the same things.
Their feeds tell them about the people
who make their culture, people who
aren’t so different from them, just
maybe a bit more glistening. Alex and
Wendy’s feeds assure them that they
aren’t lonely. Their feeds give them
permission to like what they already
like. Their feeds let them know that
their culture is winning.

Christian Lorentzen is a writer living in
Brooklyn.

Alex and Wendy believe in the
algorithm. It’s the force that orga¬
nizes their feeds, arranges their queues,
and tells them that if they liked this
song, video, or book, they might like
that one too. They never have to
think about the algorithm, and their
feeds offer a kind of protection. Alex
hates to waste his time. His time is so
precious. It makes Wendy feel sad
when she reads a book she doesn’t
love. She might have read one of the
books her friends loved. If their feeds
lead them astray, Alex and Wendy

adjust them. There’s only so
much time, and when they have
kids, there’ll be even less time.
Alex and Wendy aren’t snobs.
They don’t need to be told what
not to like. They’d rather not
know about it.

Of course, I don’t believe that
Alex and Wendy exist. But as a
cultural journalist, as a book
critic, I’ve been put on notice
that I work for them.

2 .

It is a commonplace that we
live in a time of political polar¬
ization and culture war, but if
culture is considered not in
terms of left and right but as a
set of attitudes toward the arts,
then, at least among people
who pay attention to the arts,
we live in an era that cherishes
consensus. The first consensus is that
ours is an age of plenty. There is so
much to watch, to hear, to see, to read,
that we should count ourselves lucky.
We are cursed only by too many options
and too little time to consume all the
wonderful things on offer. The cultural
consumer (Alex or Wendy) is therefore
best served by entities that point them
to the right products. Find the right
products, and you can undergo an ex¬
perience you can share with your
friends, even the thousands of them
you’ve never met. Of course, individual

Illustrations by Nate Kitch

CRITICISM

people have preferences and interests,
so filters, digital or human, will be re-
quired. Everyone will have favorites.
What’s superfluous is the negative opin¬
ion. The negative opinion wastes Alex
and Wendy’s time.

No doubt a consumerist mode of
engagement with the arts has always
been with us. Its current manifestation
mimics the grammar of social media:
the likable, the shareable, the trend¬
ing, the quantifiable, the bite-size. It is
no surprise that this set of gestures has
become dominant. What jars is the self-
satisfaction expressed by people who
should know better. Editors and critics
belong to a profession with a duty of
skepticism. Instead, we find a class of
journalists drunk on the gush. In televi¬
sion, it takes the form of triumphalism:
a junk medium has matured into re¬
spectability and its critics with it. In
music, there is poptimism, a faith that
whatever the marketplace sends to the
top must be good. Film and art writing
were corrupted so long ago by slavish
fixations on the box office and the auc¬
tion price that it’s now hard to imagine
them otherwise. Literary journalism has
been a holdout in this process of erosion:
although literary blockbusters will tout
that status when they achieve it, pres¬
ence on the bestseller list has more often
been seen as counter-indicative of qual¬
ity, the crossover as a happy freak.

The traditional driver of literary cov¬
erage in newspapers and magazines has
been book publishers’ schedules. Books
have been treated both as news and as
objects to be evaluated. The primary
mode of engagement has been the re¬
view, placed on the page in the vicin¬
ity of advertisements purchased by the
publishers. That model is outdated.
Books coverage now rises or falls in the
slipstream of social media. The basic
imperatives of the review—analysis
and evaluation—are being abandoned
in favor of a nodding routine of recom¬
mendation. You might like this, you
might like that. Let’s have a little chat
with the author. What books do you
keep on your bedside table? What’s your
favorite TV show? Do you mind that
we’re doing this friendly Q&A instead
of reviewing your book? What if a gen¬
eration of writers grew up with nobody
to criticize them?

I am not making an elitist argument,
though I’m skeptical of the popular and

the commercial. To be interested in
literature all you need is a library card.
Literary writing is any writing that re¬
wards critical attention. It’s writing that
you want to read and to read about. It’s
something different from entertain¬
ment. It involves aesthetic and political
judgments and it’s not easily quantifi¬
able. Negativity is part of this equation
because without it positivity is mean¬
ingless. There is a new wave of writers
rising in America, writers such as Yaa
Gyasi with her formally daring histori¬
cal fiction; Patricia Lockwood, pioneer
of a digital-native lyricism; Karan Ma-
hajan, a political novelist for a post-
globalized era; Nico Walker, the opioid
epidemic’s hard-boiled chronicler; and
Jenny Zhang, with her incandescent
rendering of the lives of migrants and
their children; to name a few. (I’ve re¬
viewed their work, so consider this my
list of recommendations—you can take
it or leave it.) They are being published
by an ever-consolidating set of big
houses in New York and an ever-
expanding array of small presses across
the country. These writers and their
readers are ill-served by a culture that
treats their books merely as props for
selfies or potential gift items. They de¬
serve critics who can deliver painstak¬
ing appraisals within a tradition of lost
and found books that itself requires the
constant work of rediscovery. For better
or worse, the best tool we have for this
work is the book review.

3 .

In December, Columbia Journalism
Review published an item by Sam
Eichner under the headline “What’s
Behind a Recent Rise in Books Cov¬
erage?” The answer was a quest for
web traffic. The editors Eichner quoted
celebrated the bright new modes.
There would be more recommenda¬
tions. There would be more rankings.
There would be more online book
clubs. Instagram would be harnessed.
There would still be criticism but fewer
“traditional” reviews. Readers want to
be served in the way fans are served.
Books should be treated in the man¬
ner of movies or television shows, as
occasions for collective chatter, as
storehouses of shareable trivia, and
once in a while as containers of de¬
tachable ideas. The overall vision was
that of literary journalism as a form of

higher publicity. In keeping with that
spirit (the spirit of the flack), Eichner
channeled his interviewees—editors
from the New York Times, New York
magazine, BuzzFeed, and The Atlantic,
touting their own publications, trying
to justify their editorial decisions and
keep their jobs—and explained the
recent rise in books coverage:

In some ways, mainstream book cov¬
erage is coming down from its histori¬
cally lofty perch to join the rest of
arts coverage, catering less to the in¬
telligentsia and more to the casual
reader, who may not be interested in
literary fiction or nonfiction. With so
much to watch and read and listen
to—and so many people chiming in
on what to watch and read and listen
to—it’s no surprise readers are hun¬
gering for a trusted source who can
point them in the direction of books
tailored to their interests. And those
same readers may be looking for the
kind of full-court, blogosphere press
typically reserved for watercooler
shows like Sharp Objects and meme
machines like A Star Is Born.

Here a consumerist vision of reading is
presented as a form of anti-elitism. The
quaint use of “intelligentsia” suggests a
suspect class of self-regarding intellec¬
tuals with an echo of Cold War red¬
baiting. And then a fantastic fictional
character: the casual reader who dis¬
dains literary books but is eager for, say,
the New York Times to tell her which
nonliterary books to read when she isn’t
busy watching HBO or listening to
podcasts. And what does “full-court,
blogosphere press” describe but hastily
written, barely edited, cheap, and ut¬
terly disposable online jetsam? Such is
the nature of the new “books coverage.”
I was aware of the trend. Two months
before Eichner’s story ran, my contract
to review books at New York magazine
was dropped. I had been told that al¬
though its books coverage would be
expanding, what I did—book reviews—
had “little value.”

One of the hazards of this approach, if
not its broader pointlessness from an
intellectual standpoint, became appar¬
ent a few weeks later. The New York
Times Book Review's By the Book col¬
umn is a weekly feature in which a
prominent author answers a set of boil-

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

erplate questions about her reading hab¬
its. It has high trivia value. The author
typically has a book to promote, and the
Times gets free content from a famous
person (who may not be famous as an
author, but it’s the fame that’s the point).
In the By the Book column of December
16, Alice Walker, the seventy-five-year-
old author of The Color Purple and a new
book of poetry, Taking the Arrow Out of
the Heart, said that one of the books on
her nightstand was And the Truth Shall
Set You Free by David Icke, a fringe figure
in his native Britain but a
known trafficker in anti-Semitic
conspiracies involving sinister
reptilian aliens who control the
world. “In Icke’s books there is
the whole of existence, on this
planet and several others, to
think about,” Walker wrote. “A
curious person’s dream come
true.” In that Walker had previ¬
ously enthused about Icke’s
writing on her blog and had a
history of anti-Semitic state¬
ments, this wasn’t exactly news.

But the online magazine Tablet
took the Times to task for pub¬
lishing Walker’s recommenda¬
tion “unchallenged.”

On December 18, the Times
published an interview with its
chief books editor, Pamela Paul.

She explained that By the
Book is an email questionnaire
sent to its subjects and edited
only for space and factual ac¬
curacy but not for its subjective
content. “Readers have cer¬
tainly learned something about
the author and her tastes and
opinions,” Paul said of Walker. “I think
it’s worthwhile information for them
to know.” Perhaps it is, but that had
never seemed to be the point of the By
the Book column in the past. The
point was never scrutiny. The point
was a transaction of fame for publicity.

Why do book reviews exist?

We know that books have histori¬
cally been treated as news and as ob¬
jects for evaluation. We know that
publishers might want to advertise in
the vicinity of book reviews, though by
most accounts book reviews in newspa¬
pers have been unprofitable in modern
memory. We might add that books are

something many writers are eager to
write about, often for only modest fees.
But there is another reason that book
reviews have persisted for centuries:
nobody has ever figured out a better way
to write about new books.

The book review is and always has
been an unsatisfying form. In its news¬
paper iteration, it is a text of somewhere
around a thousand words tasked with
summarizing, contextualizing, analyz¬
ing, and evaluating a work likely more
than fifty times as long. The wrongs a

reviewer can commit within this space
are many; cliches are pandemic. In
reviews of a novel or a work of narra¬
tive non-fiction a dreary formula per¬
sists: prolix yet cursory summary
topped with a smattering of more or
less irrelevant biographical informa¬
tion yielding to polite and generic
adjectives of praise (compelling, en¬
grossing, charming) before a dip into
enthusiasm-draining caveats placed
into the penultimate paragraph to
prove that the critic is, you know, a
critic, and at last a kind conclusion to
make sure we’re all still friends and no
one’s time has been entirely wasted. A
critic I know used to call this sort of
review “the shit sandwich.” The pan

can be as dubious a form: the reviewer
scolding an author for not writing a
book she never dreamed of writing, slap¬
ping a conventional novelist with the
Kafka stick, crucifying the celebrated
writer for the sins of her admirers. By
comparison, heaping praise and over¬
rating books is usually a matter of ac¬
quiescing to publishers’ presentation of
their products: publicity materials exist
to be recycled by reviewers.

Literary criticism is ancient but book
reviews became pervasive only in the
seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. What Andrew
O’Hagan has called the Age of
Reviews began after the death
of Samuel Johnson in 1784- The
Edinburgh Review, the most of¬
ten cited precursor of modern
literary journals, was founded in
1802. “A crowd of literary men
found employment in writing
about books rather than in writ¬
ing them,” Stopford A. Brooke
writes in English Literature ad
670 to ad 1832, “and the litera¬
ture of Criticism became a
power.” This power was instant¬
ly corrupting. On these shores,
in his 1846 series of broadsides,
“The Literati of New York City,”
Edgar Allan Poe aimed to eluci¬
date “the distinction between
the popular ‘opinion’ of the
merits of contemporary authors
and that held and expressed of
them in private literary society.”
“Quacks” inflated their own
reputations through networking
campaigns that a genius would
never resort to, which was why
a genius like Nathaniel Hawthorne
was little known and poor. “We
place on paper without hesitation a
tissue of flatteries, to which in soci¬
ety we could not give utterance, for
our lives, without either blushing or
laughing outright.”

Complaints about reviewing have
tended to focus on the quality and
tone of evaluation. Occasionally there
is a social component, writers being
both hermits and herd animals. “The
literary Rotarians,” Dorothy Parker
wrote in 1928, “have helped us and
themselves along to the stage where
it doesn’t matter a damn what you
write; where all writers are equal.” In
1935, as Michelle Dean recounts in

CRITICISM

her study of women critics, Sharp, Mar¬
garet Marshall and Mary McCarthy
published a five-part series in The
Nation, “Our Critics, Right or
Wrong”: “The history of American
criticism during the last ten years,”
they wrote, “has been a history of
inflations and deflations: the first,
raucous, hyperbolic; the second, apol¬
ogetic, face-saving, whispered.” If re¬
viewing were held up to the criteria of
science, it would have gotten things
exactly wrong:

Criticism in America during the past
ten years has on the whole worked for
the misunderstanding of works of art
and the debasement of taste. The
tony critics as well as the hack book
reviewers have contributed to this
anarchy of standards.

Note that McCarthy and Mar¬
shall refer to a world in which the
concept of “standards” is the crucial
issue and misevaluation the primary
offense. Two decades later, in 1959,
Elizabeth Hardwick argued in these
pages that the space between the poles
of inflation and deflation had been
filled by a “mush of concession,” a
phrase she borrowed from Emerson:

Sweet, bland commendations fall ev¬
erywhere upon the scene; a universal,
if somewhat lobotomized, accommo¬
dation reigns. A book is born into a
puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile
criticism is only a memory.

Sixty years on, Hardwick’s essay, “The
Decline of Book Reviewing” (excerpted
on page 35), has taken on a legendary
status. It’s said to have served as the
founding manifesto of The New York
Review of Books, which Hardwick
helped start in 1963, along with her
husband, Robert Lowell, Random
House editor Jason Epstein, and the
journal’s coeditors, Barbara Epstein and
Robert B. Silvers, formerly Hardwick’s
editor at Harper’s Magazine.

Fifteen years later, Hardwick’s
crowd, the New York Intellectuals, had
become the predominant force in
criticism, in part through the influ¬
ence of the New York Review. Echoing
Poe, the critic Richard Kostelanetz
blasted the scene for what he saw as its
Mafia ethos and inattention to young
talent in his 1974 diatribe The End of
Intelligent Writing. One of his targets

was Philip Roth, whose fame, Kostelan¬
etz argued, was the result of collusion by
publishers and critics to hype Portnoy’s
Complaint beyond its merits. Kostelanetz
set out a vision of the literary power
structure as layers of an onion, and
named names. The same year, in a letter
to the New York Review, Roth suggested
that one of his critics, daily Times re¬
viewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,
be replaced by a nationwide contest
among undergraduates. Such polemics
and feuds are the signs of a healthy
literary culture, a zone where the stakes
are high even if the audience is small
and may reside mostly in posterity.

Endless lists of

RECOMMENDATIONS BLIGHT THE
LANDSCAPE WITH SUPERLATIVES
THAT ARE HARD TO BELIEVE

These arguments took place within
a set of more or less stable institutions.
The past two decades have been a
phase of upheaval, panic, and collapse.
The crisis of closures that has struck
America’s regional newspapers hit
their books pages first. Among pub¬
lishers, authors, and critics there was
much moaning and wailing, an under¬
standable reaction given that these
parties were losing valuable publicity
if not their livelihoods. Having started
out reviewing for the Hartford Con-
rant, which no longer runs original
reviews and only occasionally picks
them up from the wires, I was sympa¬
thetic to this sentiment. But as these
losses piled up, it was difficult to feel
that something wonderful had been
lost, even if it had real value in swaths
of the country that were losing many
things all at once. What mattered
most were the big city papers, espe¬
cially the New York Times and, as
Hardwick wrote, “all those high-
school English teachers, those faithful
librarians and booksellers, those trust¬
ing suburbanites, those bright young
men and women in the provinces, all
those who believe in the judgment of
the Times and who need its direction.”
When the Times Book Review was list¬
less, it started to resemble “a provincial
literary journal, longer and thicker,

but not much different in the end from
all those small-town Sunday ‘Book
Pages.’” As Steve Wasserman, editor
of the Los Angeles Times Book Review
from 1996 to 2005, wrote in Columbia
Journalism Review in 2007:

Book coverage is not only meager but
shockingly mediocre. The pabulum
that passes for most reviews is an in¬
sult to the intelligence of most read¬
ers. One is tempted to say, perversely,
that its disappearance from the pages
of America’s newspapers is arguably
cause for celebration.

It might have been, if a renewal had
followed collapse, and for a while it
seemed one would.

That decade saw the rise of the
book blogger. The early book
bloggers—typically amateurs, many
of whom have gone on to become
authors and critics for mainstream
outlets, among them Mark Athita-
kis, Maud Newton, Mark Sarvas,
Levi Stahl, Tao Lin—were an anar¬
chic bunch, pursuing their own idiosyn¬
cratic enthusiasms and antagonisms
(Sam Tanenhaus, then editor of The
New York Times Book Review, was a
frequent target of their ire, envy, and,
occasionally, awe). Constricted neither
by convention nor by editors, the blog¬
gers, at their best, popularized worthy
but obscure writers, circulated the most
interesting criticism that caught their
eyes, and devoted tremendous energy to
indexing the literary scene. They were
passionate. At their worst, they aired
uninformed opinions about books they
hadn’t read, but mostly their work was
a tonic. Group blogs such as The Mil¬
lions (recently purchased by Publishers
Weekly), Electric Literature, and
HTMLGIANT became forums for
recent MFA graduates and geographi¬
cally isolated aspiring writers to work
out their ideas in public and form
their own communities. As with blogs
generally, book blogs entered a de¬
cline as social media became the zone
where people ventured their consid¬
ered or (increasingly) stray thoughts.
But the DNA of the book blogs sur¬
vived as literary institutions began
pouring their resources into their
online manifestations. The Paris Re¬
view Daily, NewYorker.com, and this
magazine—which for a time ran an
excellent blog, Sentences, by the critic

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

Wyatt Mason—absorbed some of the
modes of the book blog. Literary Hub,
a venture largely funded by the publish¬
ing industry, preserves the style of the
book blog while also serving as a clear¬
inghouse for book excerpts, personal
essays, and even fiction, which has
rarely been a popular form online. In
2013, BuzzFeed entered the books space
with a declared policy of running only
positive coverage. “Why waste breath
talking smack about something?” its
books editor, Isaac Fitzgerald, told Poin¬
ter. “You see it in so many old media-
type places, the scathing takedown rip.”

I met Fitzgerald around that time at
a party, and I’m fond of him. His pro¬
book policies seemed harmless, and
when BuzzFeed went out of its way to
crown a book, as it did with Alexandra
Kleeman’s 2015 novel You Too Can
Have a Body Like Mine, he and his team
did so with an eye for hip new talent
that would appeal to their presumably
youthful audience. But it seemed to me
that by ruling out the negative and
becoming in essence a cheerleader for
certain books, BuzzFeed had embraced
a formula of literary irrelevance by dis¬
avowing a spirit of disputation. Who
cares what you think if your every word
is a compliment?

About fifteen years ago, as happens
from time to time, there was a move¬
ment in the literary world against
“snark” and toward a new niceness.
Dave Eggers, author and publisher of
McSweeney’s, spoke of wanting to send
a message to younger people that “books
are good, that reading is good ... and
that anyone pissing in the very small
and fragile ecosystem that is the literary
world is mucking it up for everyone.” I
don’t think that negative reviews, even
snarky ones, are toxic in the way that
Eggers characterized them, nor do I
think the new books coverage is toxic.
If we run with Eggers’s ecosystem meta¬
phor, the new books coverage is more
like litter. Endless lists of recommenda¬
tions blight the landscape with superla¬
tives that are hard to believe, especially,
as is inevitable, when they aren’t drawn
from the work of critics but compiled by
poorly paid writers who haven’t read the
books they’re recommending, a standard
practice in preview lists. Proliferating
recommendations become what Hard¬
wick called “a hidden dissuader, gently,
blandly, respectfully denying whatever

vivacious interest there might be in
books or in literary matters generally.”
Readers are better served by the algo¬
rithm, which never pretends to have an
actual opinion.

6 .

What is the difference between televi¬
sion and literature?

In his 1980 New Yorker essay on the
rise of television culture, “Within the
Context of No Context,” George
W. S. Trow made a distinction between
“the grid of intimacy,” that is, the grid
of social life—and the place where
books are read, a grid of author and
reader—and “the grid of two hun¬
dred million,” a zone of common
experience, roughly the size of the
US population at the time, engen¬
dered by television. What Trow
called “the Aesthetic of the Hit” was
something like “love,” which televi¬
sion sought to create in its viewers to
keep them watching:

The love engendered by familiarity.
False love is the Aesthetic of the Hit.
What is loved is a hit. What is a hit is
loved. The back-and-forth of this es¬
tablishes a context. It seems powerful.
What could be more powerful? The
love of tens of millions of people. It’s a
Hit! Love it! It’s a Hit. It loves you be¬
cause you love it because it’s a Hit!
This is a powerful context, with a
most powerful momentum. But what?
It stops in a second. The way love can
stop, but quicker. It’s not love. There
is a distance so great between the lov¬
ers that no contact is ever made that
is not an abstract contact.

The internet collapsed this dis¬
tance, not between television’s cre¬
ators and its viewers but among the
viewers themselves. Now viewers can
discuss TV shows as they are being
broadcast, introducing a new grid of
mass quasi-intimacy between viewers
in their living rooms and the program
on the tube. This new grid emerges
nightly on Twitter, which instantly
transforms into such a forum when¬
ever a popular program comes on. It
also partakes of a genre native to the
internet: the TV recap.

Why would someone who watched a
television show on a Sunday night want
to read a summary of it on Monday
morning? I’ve often been puzzled by this
question. Episode by episode, television

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doesn’t require much in the way of in¬
terpretation. Any program that did
would be too recondite to stay on the
air, the work of David Lynch being a
glorious exception. But the TV recap
has become a popular form because it
extends the love between program and
viewers. The love is still false.

Forty years ago, Trow could be confident
that he was writing to an audience that
disdained television even if his readers
watched more of it than they would
have liked to admit. Too much time
spent in front of the tube was discussed
as a national epidemic and a plague on
the nation’s children. Three or four
generations have now grown up
watching television, and sometime in
the first decade of this century, the
stigma of loving television too much
evaporated. The canary in the coal
mine of the new reverence for televi¬
sion was, of course, The Sopranos, at
once a supremely satisfying work of
entertainment and the most over¬
rated cultural artifact of our time. It’s
true that by the going standards of tele¬
vision, The Sopranos offered superior
acting, combining professionals and
strikingly real-looking amateurs, and
superior writing and production values.
Packed with constant (and obvious)
allusions to classic Hollywood cinema,
it combined pulp and melodrama
around a simple moral quandary: Could
Tony Soprano, head of a crime organi¬
zation and a psychotic murderer, still,
as a loving if philandering husband and
father, be considered “a good man”?
The show did its own work of interpre¬
tation in the endless, and increasingly
tedious, therapy sessions that passed for
its novel twist on the mobster genre,
even though they weren’t particularly
novel. Subtext was eliminated. You
might think this would render further
commentary superfluous. In practice, it
just made it easier, right down to the
vacuous question of whether Tony was
whacked in the show’s final scene. In¬
terpretation became a form of tran¬
scription, the recap a bridge between
the grid of intimacy and the grid of two
hundred million.

A thousand recaps bloomed. It be¬
came customary for outlets like Slate to
publish online discussions of episodes
the day after they aired. The practice of

recapping spread to ever more venues,
including the New York Times, and to
ever less sophisticated programs. The
journalists who engaged in it seemed to
have finally found a way to combine
their two favorite activities—watching
television and doing their homework.
That the television shows were per¬
fectly comprehensible and didn’t require
much actual exegesis didn’t matter, be¬
cause people clicked anyway. Enjoying
television, once something considered
slothful, became a respectable activity
among the chattering classes, and one
could hear a sigh of relief. It was the
sound of the meritocracy letting itself
off the intellectual hook.

Modeling books coverage on

THAT OF TELEVISION WILL ALIENATE
ITS ONLY VIABLE AUDIENCE: PEOPLE
WHO ARE INTERESTED IN BOOKS

“Those of us who love TV have won
the war,” the New Yorker television
critic Emily Nussbaum wrote in 2015.
“The best scripted shows are regarded
as significant art—debated, revered,
denounced. TV showrunners are em¬
braced as heroes and role models, even
philosophers.” It’s understandable that
critics should want to act as boosters
of the medium they criticize, espe¬
cially in the case of television where
even in the age of streaming, a pro¬
gram’s failure to gain an audience will
result in cancellation. But in the case
of television the result has been a per¬
vasive overinflation. “Left to their own
devices,” Kyle Paoletta recently wrote
in The Baffler,

our most prominent television critics
seem solely interested in defining the
best and the greatest, as determined
by increasingly esoteric criteria. Such
parlor room conversations would all
be in good fun, were their efferves¬
cent tone not so clearly impairing the
ability of the critics to view their sub¬
ject with even a modicum of distance
or restraint.

That tone is spilling over into the
rest of the arts, where the transforma¬
tion of business models or perennially
gloomy surveys—purporting to show

a general decline in, say, reading—
create a false sense of imperilment.

Bringing books coverage “down from
its historically lofty perch,” modeling it
on coverage of television, and emphasiz¬
ing human interest in authors will alien¬
ate its only viable audience: people who
are interested in books. No book in the
short term will ever have the audience
of any single TV show. TV critics oc¬
casionally make claims for “scripted
television’s raiding of literature,” as Matt
Zoller Seitz of New York has: voice-over
narration, occasionally unreliable; chap-
terlike episodes; multiple perspectives; a
distinctive voice. What complicates a
work of entertainment is basic to a work
of literature. Readers of book reviews
are often reading about a book not
only as potential readers of that book
but to partake of an intellectual world
that constantly scrutinizes more
books than any one person could
ever read. Often the attraction is the
writing in the criticism. Profiles can
have similar effects if written in the
spirit of appreciative criticism. But
writers are not famous like actors, and
shouldn’t be under the burden of being
as interesting as their books, and the
authors of the most interesting books
never will be. Most Q&As with young
authors simply bend their idiom to a
coded language of salesmanship. Pity
them in their pantomime of likability.

8 .

In an environment where “sweet,
bland commendations” have become
the norm, Hardwick’s essay still has
lessons to teach us. “Simple ‘coverage’
seems to have won out over the drama
of opinion,” she writes.

“Readability,” a cozy little word, has
taken the place of the old-fashioned re¬
quirement of a good, clear prose style,
which is something else. All differences
of excellence, of position, of form are
blurred by the slumberous acceptance.

But Hardwick was describing a failure
of critics. Today it’s criticism itself
that has been deemed insufficient be¬
cause reviews aren’t engines for traffic.
“In the past,” Pamela Paul told CJR,

when a book came into the Book Re¬
view, the question we would ask is,
“Does this book deserve to be reviewed?
Should we review this?” ... Now the
question is, “Does this book deserve

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

coverage? And if so, what does that
look like?”

But if a book doesn’t merit a review,
why cover it at all?

The edifice of “books coverage”
that has been constructed around
the work of critics looks a lot like the
coverage of television—a tissue of
lists, recommendations, profiles,
Q&As, online book clubs, lifestyle
features, and self-promotional essays
by authors of new books—an edifice
so slapdash it could be blown away
in a week. And if the house col¬
lapsed, nobody would miss it.

A typical issue of The New York Times
Book Review contains about a dozen
full-length book reviews, plus several
capsule reviews. By its very nature, it’s
the sort of publication that will be en¬
tirely satisfying to no one if it’s doing
its job right: appealing to readers of
different political persuasions and
varied tastes while assuming a certain
baseline of literacy. Meanwhile, the
paper’s three daily critics write at least
once a week (they are three of the
best working anywhere). By a low esti¬
mate, that’s about seven hundred and
fifty book reviews a year. So what’s
the problem?

When new imperatives emerge, fa¬
miliar things have a way of suddenly
disappearing. In his 1999 book My
Pilgrim’s Progress: Media Studies,
1950-1998, Trow wrote:

The New York Times today is seek¬
ing to know its reader’s mind. Its
reader’s mind is now a mystery, and
the New York Times is terrified that
the mind of the generation growing
up now—the generation that will
someday replace its current readers—
is a complete mystery.

In the two decades that have passed
since Trow ventured that diagnosis,
the mystery and the terror have only
become more acute. Traffic seemed to
be one answer to the mystery, but in
many contexts traffic has proven to be
an unreliable narrator, a fairweather
friend, or an outright fraud. The most
infamous case has been the widely
touted “pivot to video” led by Face-
book, whose declared emphasis on
video led many media companies to

redirect their resources to camera-
ready content while shedding writing
staff. When Facebook pivoted away
from video a short time later to em¬
phasize its users’ personal content in
its news feed, it turned out these in¬
vestments were made in vain, and a
few fledgling media companies that
had made the pivot were shuttered,
auctioned off, or, in the case of
BuzzFeed, laid off hundreds of staffers.

In 2014, the New York Times pro¬
duced an internal innovation report.
The report was quickly leaked, and
since then its lessons have been widely
summarized as “become more like
BuzzFeed.” It’s not an unreasonable
summary, but it’s simpler to look at the
text of the report itself. A section un¬
der the heading “De-emphasize Print”
includes these three imperatives:

—Shift the newsroom’s center of
gravity away from Page One. Creating
additional measures of success, using
metrics like traffic, sharing and en¬
gagement could help.

—Ask our editors to read more like
our readers. Each desk should have at
least one staff member monitoring its
report on the mobile web, and on our
mobile and tablet apps. Eventually
this will become second nature.

—Make digital a key part of evalua¬
tions. Reviews should include sections
for digital as well as print perfor¬
mance. This should be the case for the
whole newsroom, particularly for lead¬
ers. Has their desk developed a smart
strategy for social media? Are they
open and enthusiastic about experi¬
menting? Are they making smart, dig¬
itally focused hires? To do this, we
must first communicate digital expec¬
tations to our employees.

Something the report doesn’t say is
that for certain types of journalism the
quest for traffic is incompatible with, if
not antithetical to, the task at hand.
Once a critic has decided, or been as¬
signed, to review a book, should any
questions of attracting traffic figure
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CRITICISM

As BuzzFeed books editor Arianna Re-
bolini put it to CJR’s Eichner, “Are you
going to put your time into something
that’s not going to share well?”

I began writing this essay in Decem¬
ber, at the height of the season of “Best
of 2018” lists. Between their dual func¬
tion as year-end honors and holiday
shopping guides, such lists will always
be with us. In the Times, they’ve
achieved a sort of mania. Beyond its
standard “100 Notable Books of 2018”
and “The 10 Best Books of 2018,” there
was an “Off the Book Lists” set of rec¬
ommendations from Times staffers of
books that didn’t make the “Notables”
list. If so many deserving books were left
off, then why not expand the “Notables”
list to one hundred and twenty? Next
came a set of recommendations from the
authors on the “Best Books” list. The
new year brought no respite from lists.
What is the utility—to anyone—of an
item like “Hot Books for Cold Days,”
published by the Times on January 18
and consisting, after a one-sentence
introduction (“As the mercury plunges,
you could pile on extra sweaters, huddle
beneath an afghan, drink hot tea—or
you could get lost in a book that will
transport you to sunny, sweaty places”),
of short, undistinguished quotations
from nine very popular books (includ¬
ing Stephen King’s Cujo, Toni Morri¬
son’s Beloved, and Ian McEwan’s Atone¬
ment) to the effect that it’s hot outside
in the summertime?

In its pursuit of traffic or its spirit of
experimentation or its efforts to make
its editors read like its readers, the Times
seems to have lost its sense of its audi¬
ence’s intelligence. How else to explain
an item like “How to Tap Your Inner
Reader” by Gregory Cowles, an editor of
the Book Review ? A tag attached to the
article reads: “This is part of A Year of
Living Better,’ a monthly series of how-to
guides for subscribers that will help you
improve your life, community and
world.” Cowles, a fine critic on occasion
(and my editor on my single contribu¬
tion to the Book Review), takes to his
task without condescension, though I
can’t imagine (having been asked to
write a few shopping guides myself) he
enjoyed it: “Finding time to read gener¬
ally means making time to read, and that
means making it a priority.” Indeed. The
self-help approach is apparent in an¬
other regular Times feature, Match

Book, an advice column that answers
letters from readers seeking specific book
recommendations (What should mem¬
bers of my philanthropic society read?
Can you recommend books about
Maine? Fiction about music? Spiritual
poetry?). As we know from spending any
time on the internet, or from Nathanael
West’s Miss Lonelyhearts —the classic
American newspaper advice columnist
novel—the world is full of desperate
people. Who knew they were so desper¬
ate for book recommendations? Aren’t
those easy to come by in any bookstore
or on Amazon?

10 .

When it’s not busy making recom¬
mendations—duplicating the efforts
of pervasive algorithms, albeit with
the air of a human touch—the Times’
books coverage is anti-intellectual in
more traditional ways. “You’re organiz¬
ing a literary dinner party,” says the
Times to recipients of its By the Book
questionnaire. “Which three writers,
dead or alive, do you invite?” The pre¬
sumption that reading is best experi¬
enced as a polite, middle-class affair
and not a solitary activity is a different
form of the flight from scrutiny. The
Times has always been afflicted by
what Gary Indiana called a “worship
of conventional success and its sym¬
bols,” and this creates a problem when
it covers authors, because compared
with an actual celebrity or a Holly¬
wood showrunner, an author’s success
will always be marginal. If the first
question to be asked about an author
is, How did you make it? quite likely
the answer is the author wrote books
that Amazon put at the top of its list
of recommendations. Another Times
column, Cover Stories, examines the
packaging of books as if the packaging
were the thing itself.

In December, an article in the Times
ran online under the headline “Late-
Night TV Hosts Give Publicity-Starved
Novelists the Star Treatment.” Here are
the modes of the Times’ literary imagi¬
nary: the way novelists wish they were
treated (as stars) and what they crave
(publicity). Seth Meyers, over the course
of five years, has welcomed “a few dozen”
literary authors as guests on Late Night,
“many of them far from household
names,” and this has given him and the
like-minded Daily Show host Trevor

Noah “an enormous amount of influ¬
ence in the publishing world.” Watch¬
ing Meyers interview an author for four
to six minutes, you get the sense that he
might have read his guest’s book, or at
least skimmed it closely enough to get a
sense of what it’s about and where and
when it’s set. Surely, as the Times re¬
ports, authors can expect a spike in sales
and interest in their books, but the
point of these interviews seems to be
the burnishing of the image of the host.
You can trust these comedian-
intellectuals to interpret the news for
you. They even read books!

“To get authors back into the mix
says this is not esoteric stuff, this is part
of pop culture,” the novelist Rebecca
Makkai told the Times of her appear¬
ance on Late Night. And who could
begrudge an author her six and a half
minutes of fame, even if the potential
of any novel truly to enter pop culture,
unless it’s adapted for the screen, is slim
to nil? The American novelists who
counted as celebrities and appeared
occasionally on television—Norman
Mailer, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag,
Philip Roth—are all dead. So is David
Foster Wallace. The elders—Toni Mor¬
rison, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo,
Thomas Pynchon—are covetous of
their privacy. Jonathan Franzen is the
nearest thing to a going celebrity in
American literature. A Times Magazine
profile, “Jonathan Franzen Is Fine With
All of It,” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner,
appeared on July 1, 2018, a few months
in advance of his new collection of es¬
says, The End of the End of the Earth.
Once upon a time, Franzen balked at
going on television and accepting
Oprah Winfrey’s imprimatur. It wasn’t
the highbrow thing to do. Seventeen
years later, he has become the literary
embodiment of the Times’ television
and digital anxieties: What does suc¬
cess mean if it doesn’t happen on a
screen? The profile treats Franzen’s nov¬
els as an afterthought, his new essays as
a peg, and his devotion to bird-watching
as a personality quirk. In the Times’
crosshairs he is a walking internet
meme and a failed television writer.

A showrunner for Franzen’s adapta¬
tion of his 2015 novel Purity calls to tell
him the project is off. Star Daniel Craig
calls to apologize to the author for
abandoning the project to make the
next James Bond film. Poor Franzen:

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

the 2012 HBO adaptation of The Cor-
rections also fell through. Will he ever
win? In the absence of Oprah’s Book
Club, sales of his novels have fallen
from the low seven figures to the low
six figures. Boo-hoo. Nor can he win
online, where,

though critics loved him and he had a
devoted readership, others were using
the very mechanisms and platforms
that he warned against (like the internet
in general and social media in specific)
to ridicule him.

Well, it’s true that Franzen is often
ridiculed on the internet and that his
literary success hasn’t translated to
Hollywood, but those are two of the
least interesting things about him.
“Gratuitous haters don’t want to read a
whole book,” Brodesser-Akner writes.
“Most of the people who have com¬
plaints with me aren’t reading me,”
Franzen tells her. In fact, Franzen has
plenty of critics who’ve read him very
carefully and argued about his books
on formal, thematic, and political
grounds, but you wouldn’t know that
from this profile. Good news, however,
arrives in the end. Showtime calls, and
the Purity adaptation might be back on,
in “capsule” form, whatever that is.
Franzen is also working on a new novel,
which, he declares, will be his last. Now
there’s a scoop.

11 .

At the end of his life, after he’d
stopped writing, Philip Roth made a
habit of talking about the impending
death of the novel, which was sure to
transpire within a couple of decades of
his own. Screens were sapping the pub-
lie’s attention. “There was never a Gold¬
en Age of Serious Reading in America,”
he told Le Monde in 2013, “but I don’t
remember ever in my lifetime the situa¬
tion being as sad for books—with all the
steady focus and uninterrupted concen¬
tration they require—as it is today. And
it will be worse tomorrow and even
worse the day after. My prediction is
that in thirty years, if not sooner, there
will be just as many people reading
serious fiction in America as now read
Latin poetry.” Franzen, for his part, says
he’s turned to Hollywood because ours
is “an age when the novel is in retreat
and people are looking for reasons not
to have to read a book.”

No adult needs a reason not to read
a book, and novelists are always fretting
about the status of their vocation. I
don’t need to convince myself that
we’re living in a Golden Age of Serious
Fiction to keep writing about it. I
wouldn’t say we are in a time, to para¬
phrase the TV critics, of Peak Novel,
but with a new generation just arriving,
why should we pretend to be? The
novel is a durable form no matter how
many times its death has been declared.
Hollywood is chasing after writers of
books as at no time since the 1930s.
They are content’s ground zero, for bet¬
ter and worse. The effects this will have
on our literature will be the task of
critics to chart. Book reviews are the
front lines of culture and politics, where
ideas are tested before they harden into
dogma in the mouths of pundits. As
Hardwick wrote, they are the zone
where “the unusual, the difficult, the
lengthy, the intransigent, and above
all, the interesting, should expect to
find their audience.”

12 .

Now let’s think of Wendy and Alex in
a different way, as the sort of people I
know to exist. You probably know them
too. You might be a lot like them.

Wendy and Alex have never stopped
reading since they were children. Read¬
ing books, watching films, looking at
art—these are simply things they would
never not do, whatever stage they are in
their lives, however much money they
do or don’t have. They know how to find
out about what they might like and what
they might not like, whether this infor¬
mation arrives in their mailbox or their
inbox or through one of their feeds
(which feature as many strangers dis¬
cussing Marcel Proust or Clarice Lispec-
tor or the Norton Anthology of Poetry as
they do media outlets). Neither Wendy
nor Alex thinks much about the distinc-
tion between fiction and non¬
fiction, but they can tell good writing
from dull writing. Good writing casts a
spell, but spells can be hard to find. They
know the names of critics and love the
clang and clack and click of minds you
hear in a well-wrought piece of criticism.
They’re attracted to disputation and to
esoteric books. They too never have
enough time, but they’re not too con¬
cerned about wasting it. They like to
figure things out for themselves. ■

CRITICISM 33

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tiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury

— Laila Lalami, Los Angeles Times Book Review

The stories explode off the page then dig
beaneath the skin ♦ ♦ ♦ Ikonomou has given us
characters that leap up and take hold and never
quite let us go* This book is spectacular*

— Maaza Mengiste

Ivan Vladislavic occupies a place all of his own in
the South African literary landscape: a versatile
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—J*M* Coetzee

A Change of Time

A Change of Time is a book of masterful restraint,
and this restraint is a kind of tenderness*
It is a book that understands that desire
permeates everything * * * that sometimes love
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Fantastic things change into usual, the super¬
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everyday life is turned into an extraordinary
and interesting fancy world * * * Yes, that is the
way of the author: to give thrilling adventures,
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Tabucchis prose creates a deep, heart-wrenching
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Oxota

A Short Russian Novel

Lyn Hejinian

An experimental novel that
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semiautomatic

2018 Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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Evie Shockley

Poetry that examines
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2017 Laughlin Award Winner

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Exuberant and raw poems
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A Life of Ideas

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Chronicles the life and art
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Letters from Amherst
Five Narrative Letters

Samuel R. Delany

Five substantial letters
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Howto Catch a Fish
New Poetry

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New poetry addresses the
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2018 National Book Award Finalist

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Poems written about
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2018 Anisfield-Wolf Award Winner
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Poetry aboutfreedom told
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By turns plain and
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ESSAY

WHISPERINGS

A writer alone with the work
By David Means

in an exuberant state, feel-
ing filled with the muse, I told another writer: When I write, I know ev¬
erything. Everything about the characters? she asked. No, I said, every¬
thing about the world, the universe. Every. Fucking. Thing. I was being
preposterous, of course, but I was also trying to explain the feeling I got,
deep inside writing a first draft, that I was listening and receiving, listen¬
ing some more and receiving, from a place that was far enough away from
my daily life, from all of my reading, from everything.

Writers speak to themselves, whispering assurances, forming aesthetic
alliances, imagined fellowships with others, with God, with community,
with the past, with whatever, trying to sustain the will to continue to
imagine, working through aspects of their own personality, gauging the
outside culture, all in an attempt to build a scaffolding to hold up the work.
Sometimes, writers go out into the world with their ideas—as I’m doing
here—and always, at least as I see it, there is some residue of that scaffold-
building, framing their ideas as a way to frame and hold up the work they
have created, trying their best to build the case for their own creation.
Sometimes it works. Other times it proves a detriment. The work is the
work, I have often told myself—and it was in that whispery, assuring
voice, usually on some lonely afternoon, staring at the keyboard or at the
pen and paper. The power of my imagination is enough right now, I said,
and I still say, to myself, and, anyway, if the story is strong
enough nothing else should matter. It’ll get out there,
maybe, in some form, and it will touch someone.

lannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal, a small book of notes written
to herself—beautiful and pious and serious and, yes, sometimes
egotistical—carries the sound of a writer whispering to herself, and to me,
that she has to live up to the obligations of the work itself. “I want very

David Means is the author of a novel, Hystopia, and five story collections, most recently

Instructions for a Funeral.

ESSAY 37

As A STORY WRITER, I FELT
MYSELF A MEMBER OF A
COLLEGIAL ORDER OF THOSE
WHO HAD DEDICATED THEIR
LIVES TO THE FORM

much to succeed in the world with what I want to do,” she tells God. In
one entry, she says, “But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to
be clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered
so.” Here is a writer whispering to her God and to herself, expressing the
paradox of the inner creative voice, of someone who wants complete can¬
dor and honesty in her work but also longs, somehow, to be seen, to be
read, to be thought clever. Later, she says to God, “How hard it is to keep
any one intention[,] any one attitude toward a piece of work[,] any one
tone[,] any one anything.” The profound, destabilizing nature of trying to
be creative, keeping one foot inside your own faith, personality, beliefs,
political concerns, and identity while the other foot, or perhaps I should
say the writing hand, ranges wide and far, beyond the self, into the imag¬
ined world where anything and everything can and must happen. How
else did this devout soul create the Misfit, the monster whose gunshots in
the tree line destroy an entire family one by one? How else—except by
writing through faith and doubt—could she imagine her way into the
Misfit and his perversely profound comment, “She would
Y of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to
shoot her every minute of her life”?

M ears ago, a fellow writer and I sat across from each other at a table,
and a vibration seemed to pass between us—perhaps I just imagined it—of
mutual exhaustion and anticipation. With his wonderfully antic and expan¬
sive, visionary and humane tales, he had established an eminent place for
himself in the literary world. I was known, too, as a short-story writer, but not
widely. Between us—and we only sat a short while that morning, sipping
coffee—the weird, unspoken vibration continued until I said, nervously,
something about my unfinished novel. “I’m trying to write a novel,” I might’ve
said, or, “I feel the pressure of the novel,” and he said, “I’m doing the same,” or,
“I feel the same.” It was heartening to hear a fellow writer speak of the pres¬
sure to write in a longer form. It’s a feeling Alice Munro expressed in one of
her rare interviews, admitting that even with all her accolades she still felt, on
occasion, guilty about not having written a proper novel.

Over the years I struck up a written correspondence with Don DeLillo, a
writer I greatly admire, someone who has written many of the best sentences
of his generation, an elder statesman of the novel form who is admirably re¬
lentless in his vision as a writer. I wrote him long letters and I’d be thrilled to
get back postcards with just a few words, or sometimes, longer responses. One
time, when I wrote him a rambling, self-pitying note bemoaning the fact that
I hadn’t yet been able to finish a novel, he wrote one of his characteristically
brief but poignantly supportive typed notes that told me, in so many words,
that the novel took sustained effort—superhuman focus—and a lot of time
before it revealed what it was trying to do. I read between the lines. I was a
person with very little time—and mouths to feed—and perhaps I should just
keep writing stories. As a story writer I felt myself a member of a collegial or¬
der of fellow writers, those who, for the most part, had dedicated their lives to
the form: Anton Chekhov, my hero; Raymond Carver, another hero in some
ways; Munro, the very center, for me, of the possibilities of what the form
could do with time; Katherine Mansfield, who carved words into rocklike,
pure formations; Lucia Berlin, a more recent hero; Lorrie Moore, who has
written a few novels but seems ultimately a pure story writer; Lydia Davis, with
her perfect narrative nuggets; Franz Kafka, who wrote a few brilliant yet un¬
finished novels but had night visions that purified themselves into the story
form; Frank O’Connor, who wrote one of my favorites, “The Bridal Night,” a
totally neglected story that brings tears to my eyes and charges me with a de¬
sire to go in deeper; George Saunders, although if I’m honest about it, envy
enters into my regard for him. These writers seemed part of a much larger lit¬
erary world—and they were—but they were the holdouts, the ones who built
reputations on the short-story form, and they kept me company for years as I
wrote story after story.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

Eventually I wrote a novel about war—about the Vietnam War—in a
slightly twisted alternative past as imagined by a slightly twisted young
man, Eugene Allen, named in part after my grandfather. The novel was
the result of years haunted by the sense of do or die; to become known as a
writer, and to do what I had to do as a writer, to fully reveal my creative
vision, I must write the novel. But I also felt that I was betraying that part
of myself that had assured me that I was first and foremost a short-story
writer. I justified my self-betrayal and told myself that by writing a novel I
would be drawing some readers to my stories, perhaps at the
cost of breaking, for a while at least, my sense of being one
with those I loved so much, my fellow story writers.

or ten years, I was an at-home father, alone with my twins while
my wife, Geneve, worked during the day—starting when they were
around one—taking care of them day in and day out, cleaning their faces,
changing their clothes, feeding them, playing on the floor, braiding hair,
combing hair, taking them on playdates. I’ve
kept this part of my life to myself until now—
hours at the playground, with other parents, of¬
ten all mothers, and, later, picking the twins up
from school.

Those years, I taught at a community college at
night. I remember one class, in Haverstraw, New
York: English as a Second Language; working folks
who cared deeply about becoming educated and
read with devout attention and good humor. I
taught them Samuel Beckett: We read Krapp’s Last
Tape and watched a film version. They connected
with it. At the end of the semester, they pooled
resources and bought me a gift certificate to the
local mall. We wept together. Year in and year out,

I taught classes on everything but creative writing:
literature by women, one semester; another, mod¬
ern fiction. One student, a Vietnam vet—chopper
gunner—became a nurse and now works in White
Plains. Another, then a teenage mother, became a
school administrator in Westchester.

Being a caregiver and a community college
professor taught me the humility necessary to
continue; it taught me to focus on the duty, on
the crayon marks, on the lunches that needed to
be packed, on the doctor’s appointments made,
on the needs of working people. Hour after hour
of caring for children, living vicariously (in a
dangerous way) through their successes and
failures, was costly and sometimes terrifyingly lonely, but it was also grati¬
fying. I felt a part of a large network of mostly women who cared for one
another, who sustained one another—trading tidbits of advice, gossip,
spotting one another when there was an emergency, negotiating playdates,
going on school trips.

Those days fed into my work. Quietly, to myself, I said, the river that
feeds the stories has the same source; the lives of my characters come from
the same energy: they too once waddled around a playground, or were held,
or not held, as they cried to sleep, and they have been betrayed somehow,
damaged, torn up along the way. But the creative aspect, the confrontation
with the primal nature of caring for children—and twins at that—taught
me, again, the humility and grace of giving in to time itself. Once, I read
in a childcare book that the love you give your babies will eventually come
back in the end, and I took that to heart because it applies to creative work,
to the stories. You might not see it, though.

My NOVEL WAS THE RESULT
OF YEARS HAUNTED BY THE
SENSE OF DO OR DIE; TO FULLY
REVEAL MY CREATIVE VISION I
MUST WRITE THE NOVEL

Bundle,” by Cara Barer © The artist. Courtesy Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, New York

ESSAY

If readers thought my

STORIES TOO DARK, I WOULD
REPLY: WHAT COUNTRY
DO YOU LIVE IN?

In one of his stories, “August 25, 1983,” Borges describes a character
named Borges signing in at a hotel and noticing that he has already signed
in, that another character—himself—has been there ahead of him, not a
doppelganger—that would be uncharacteristically simple—but a form of
himself in the future. Eve had this feeling upon finishing a story; that
some other Means was ahead of me, checking in to the hotel, writing a story,
and handing it over to me with my own name on the title page. With the
novel, I didn’t feel that sensation: with the novel the person on the title
page was the person who wrote the novel. It was heavy and, in revi¬
sion, had to be retooled. It was worked piecemeal and couldn’t

I be held in my brain in its entirety. With a story, I feel I can ro¬
tate it like a jeweler staring through a loupe.

turned to Isaac Babel and Chekhov, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf,
Mansfield, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Bernhard, John Edgar Wideman, Kafka,
Langston Hughes, Bob Dylan, Thomas Hardy, Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac,

William S. Burroughs, and Flannery and Frank
O’Connor for inspiration, whispering to myself:
You’ve got to go to the source. I read deeply into
Native American folklore. I read history. I read
poetry. I reread the Bible. I read Abraham Joshua
Heschel. I studied Sufi dervish tales. I searched for
a sense of form.

These writers, and others, floated and orbited
and were part of my whispered reveries, but at the
center, I have to say, if I’m going to be completely
honest here, was my own vision, my own way of
working, and what felt, when things were good,
when I had done all of the work and revision, to be
a sense that the story was completely true to itself
and to my own tradition. That might sound
grand—in this self-effacing age of false humility,
when nobody is supposed to speak of internal
grandness—but when I was working, alongside, in
my imagination, my fellow short-story writers—
William Trevor, for a few years—I had to feel,
somehow, that I could pull it off. I was building a
body of work that would be about the violence and
isolation and desolation and joy and grief and grace
that I had seen, in my own life, in my own way.

I’m revealing a personal physics. But I believe
that every good writer has to whisper words of
encouragement that, when exposed to the public,
would sound delusional. When you diminish the
power of the imagination to make visionary
work—Woolf creating Septimus Warren Smith, or William Faulkner enter¬
ing Benjy-time, or Toni Morrison creating Milkman in Song of Solomon —
when you question the ability and validity of one soul, any soul, to inhabit
honestly created characters, do you diminish, in the public mind, respect for
the power of the imagination?

At times, I heard a critical voice that said, Who are you to write about
two homeless men on the shore of Lake Superior scratching a lottery
ticket? Have you been homeless? What do you know? And I wanted to
counter by saying: no, but I’ve been on the shore of Superior, alone, and
I have family members who have been homeless, and I’ve dragged garbage
bags of clothing from one halfway house to another, and I’ve felt the
sorrow involved.

If readers thought my stories too dark, or too violent, then I would reply,
quietly, in that assuring voice that only I could hear: What country do
you live in? Have you ever had a sister like mine? Or a brother? Have you

40 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

‘Literati,” by Cara Barer © The artist. Courtesy Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, New York

seen people destroyed? Have you watched a dying uncle smoke a cigarette
in the hospital, twisting off the oxygen cylinder with the Seattle gloom
outside, the cancer eating his gay beatnik lungs? Have you sat for lunch in
the East Village with a friend dying of AIDS, and listened to him laugh at
death and then, in a rage, shout at someone who was star-

B ing, I’ve got A IDS, motherfucker ? Have you prayed in a small
Irish church, some ruins in Cork, with the sky overhead?

ut here’s the thing, the twist. If I say publicly what I whisper
to myself, as I’ve done here, I actually diminish something, lose some¬
thing, not only as a writer but as a reader. The writer’s duty is to in¬
struct, first oneself, and in turn the reader, how to envision the vision:
suddenly we’re near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, up in the foothills, walk¬
ing the grassy berm that was once a part of the dam that, when it
broke, caused a catastrophic flood; we’re there with someone else, an¬
other character, and we’re going through what is now a national park,
looking down into the bowl-shaped valley filled with weeds and full-
grown trees where the water once sat on a rainy night, May 1889, wait¬
ing to plunge the fourteen miles down the valley toward the town. We
imagine this couple, on a sunny summer day, with the sound of cicadas
in the trees, and we spell it out for ourselves—and our readers—and a
story begins to unfold. As long as there are exactly enough words, in
the right tone, and as long as there is some kind of active movement, the
reader fills the rest. The reader sees it all. It is the reader’s valley, the reader’s
trees, the reader’s berm.

Each story is born of a completely different admixture, a combination of
my dream life at the moment, my concerns, and the demands of the story
itself, not only the characters in a particular situation, but also the inter¬
nal structure and language and voice. Sometimes I’ll carry a draft
around for months, maybe even, in some cases, years, and go back to it
again and again, not only with revisions but also just looking at it, holding
it, and this process is—and this is something I whisper to myself—
expensive. What I do, I say, is extremely expensive. Working this way, us¬
ing up so much time for such a small form, is costly, I say to myself. This
might be one of those grand things a writer whispers, but I think, when I
think of my colleagues in the form—Babel riding with the Red Cavalry
and suffering death at the hands of Stalin’s thugs; Chekhov writing story
after story as he supported his extended family; Munro up there in Canada,
at her desk by the window, waiting and waiting and listening and then
revising—that the cost of the form is part of its appeal. Munro wrote her
first several books in the busy confines of her life as a mother, catching
stories and bits of time the way I did. Grace Paley wrote amid her political
activism, a busy life in the streets of New York. You can feel it around a
story writer’s creations; these small missives of narrative with a void
around them, the empty space at the end of the story and the infinite space
before the first words appear: the sense that each short story
Y was created out of an impulse much stronger, sharper, more
intense than the drawn-out impulse behind a novel.

M ears ago, I wrote down, on a sheet of paper that has since been
tacked to my work-space wall, an artist credo of sorts, ideas on how I should
work, commands to myself that, from time to time, I refer to when I’m in
despair, or stuck. Most of these I keep to myself with all the selfishness that
seems necessary to protect my own artistic spirit. One aspect of being a
writer that is seldom discussed in these openmouthed days, that might look
shameful, is that a writer, any good writer, does indeed have what seem to
be trade secrets that help sustain the hard work. In his essay “A Word to the
Wise Guy,” Burroughs, coming off a gig teaching creative writing, asked,
“And am I being punished by the Muses for impiety and gross indiscretion
in revealing the secrets to a totally unreceptive audience?”

The WRITER’S DUTY IS TO
INSTRUCT, FIRST ONESELF,
AND IN TURN THE READER,
HOW TO ENVISION

ESSAY 41

One of my credos is to

LET A STORY TAKE AS LONG
AS IT NEEDS TO TAKE, EVEN
IF IT TAKES FOREVER

Burroughs’s fear—as he was suffering a post-teaching writer’s block—is
revelatory, not only because, yes, most writers are aware of the Muses, of
the submerged, often delicate source of inspiration, but because they are
also aware—or should be if they aren’t—that when they give out their tips
on how writing works, grant interviews about their own process, they are
usually doing so to a somewhat unreceptive audience. There’s only a limited
supply of writers who might understand, or find useful, your own process,
and some things should be held as secrets because, most likely, they are
unique to your own sense of how things work.

How did you make all those leaps in a single story? Where do you get
your ideas? What ideas, I say. An idea isn’t a story. A blind man leaning into
a cane on a busy street, looking forlorn as he waits for traffic to abate. The
side of a supertanker docked in Cleveland in the hot sun, once a proud
seaworthy vessel, now a ragtag museum. A white man confronting a
homeless African-American man in a train station somewhere between
Chicago and Detroit. A baby clutching life in the ICU. (I’ve seen all of
these things.)

T Truth is, for about ten years, I never once looked at that
/ list of credos. But it was there on the wall.

T T hen I was in college my father sent me Thomas Merton’s
Seeds of Contemplation. One of the best bits of advice came from a section
titled “Integrity”:

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not
saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being
the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God.
They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circum¬
stances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be
some other poet, some other saint.... They wear out their minds and bodies in
a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else’s experiences or write somebody
else’s poems.... Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success
and they are in such haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to
themselves. And when the madness is upon them they argue that their very
haste is a species of integrity.

You must become receptive to the imagination—call it the muse, call it
inspiration, call it the artist within, it doesn’t matter. It might

O take time. It might take years. If you’re honest, it might
i never happen.

ne of my credos is to let a story take as long as it needs to take,
as many revisions as it needs, even if it takes a hundred, even if it takes
forever, and I think this is a good one to abide by if you’re doing some¬
thing in a form that is relentless, that can fail with just one wrong move,
that, like poetry, is limited in some strange way by its own structure and
shape, by the nature—for lack of a proper word—of the infinite open
space around it. Grandly, with ego, I sometimes honor myself—no one
else will do it—for keeping a story at bay, for letting it sit, lonely and aban¬
doned in a file, a physical file, while I move on and my subconscious does
the work. Hemingway had that practice of holding off on a piece, stopping
in the middle of a good line until the next day, and perhaps it is a little bit
like that, except lasting months. The writer who best described this was
Andre Dubus, who, in a late essay, called his new way of writing “vertical
writing”; he wrote down into the story—he claimed—and followed the
character “home.” He put aside writing horizontally, from point A to B,
and began, he said, to go down into it vertically.

Literary form is often misunderstood. The form of something is created
within the work, as part of the process, and you discover it as you write. A
quote that I’ve lived with for a long time comes from Gerhard Richter, an
artist I admire because he works both in abstraction and in what might be

42 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

called photo-realism. He moves between two completely different modes
and in doing so proves a point: an artist can work in many voices—the
fucked-up junkie or lost hobo in the Depression and the lonely widow in her
mansion along the Hudson River. You can go anywhere. Richter, in a New
York Times interview, said something that I broke up into a found poem:

What I Learned from
Gerhard Richter

The ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE
AROUND A STORY IS THE OPEN
SPACE AT THE BEGINNING
AND AT THE END

Form is all we have
to help us cope
with fundamentally chaotic
facts and assaults.
Formulating something
is a great start.

I trust form,
trust my feeling
or capacity
to find the right form
for something.

Even if that is only by being
well organized.

That too is form.

M he organizing principle around a story,
the container that creates the form, is the limita¬
tion, the open space at the beginning and at the
end; the sense that the entire thing must take a
form—the text—with eternal open space before
and afterward. Everything must resonate within
this space. That’s what I say to myself, at least,
when I’m trying to revise, to find a way to make
something work. The best you can do is to
organize—and this includes the lyrical resonance
of the language and images—inside the limited
space as best you can—I whisper to myself—and
cut it off, end the thing, in a way that resonates
out toward both sides of the story.

Even to me this sounds like mumbo jumbo, but
that’s the kind of thinking that goes on when
you’re creating something. At some point you’ve
got to commit yourself totally to the reality of the
form, to the inherent limitations, cut the line to
let the fish swim away forever. Beckett once said, “The only fertile research
is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent.” That’s a
quote I live with. To plan ahead is not the way to go, I think, and that in¬
cludes research. I’d rather go into the story and then, later, backtrack and
find the facts to correct, or to leave alone.

“Fail better,” Beckett also said. Sometimes I’m not so sure that’s helpful for
younger writers to hear. Find an edge where you feel you have succeeded,
might be better advice to the beginner. But know that it’s a
fake edge, something that you, too, created. On the other

m believe in the functionality, the pull, the yearning, the force of narra¬
tive. It can be small, fragmented, but it has to pull. Inside Maggie Nelson’s
wonderfully explorative book The Argonauts are many stories—and just when

‘The Word Tree,” by Cara Barer © The artist. Courtesy Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, New York

ESSAY

We SIT AT A BAR WITH
FRIENDS AND TELL ONE
ANOTHER STORIES. WE DON’T
TELL NOVELS, OR ESSAYS

we grow tired of the academic, of the analytic, we are pulled back into story: Is
she going to have a baby? What will happen to her when she has a baby?

Protect the fuel pellets, I whisper. Delineate the line between the losses
you have suffered, the pain, and the narratives that you might find by us-
ing them as fuel. Once, years ago, when I went to visit my sister in the
state mental hospital, a monstrosity at the time, a huge complex with old
towers and ivy-covered brick, I took a video camera, thinking: I’ll record
all this and use it somehow. I didn’t. Instead I searched out—swinging a
net wide—for stories of the kind of men who hung around

B her in our youth: brutal young men who keyed into a teenage
girl with exploitable instability.

aldwin, in his essay “The Creative Process”:

Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate
that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
That all men are, when the chips are down, alone, is a banality—a banality be¬
cause it is very frequently stated, but very rarely, on the evidence, believed....
The state of being alone is not meant to bring to mind merely a rustic musing
beside some silver lake. The aloneness of which I speak is much more like the
aloneness of birth or death. It is like the fearful aloneness that one sees in the eyes
of someone who is suffering, whom we cannot help. Or it is like the alone¬
ness of love, the force and mystery that so many have extolled
and so many have cursed, but which no one has ever under-
-w- stood or ever really been able to control.

▼ T e sit at a bar nursing drinks with friends and telling one another
stories. Sometimes we go into polemic, but mostly we tell stories. We don’t
tell novels, or essays. We speak, we reach out to each other, with stories.

A reader reads and imagines—if instructed properly—a barn and a pig and
a spider. These are 90 percent the reader’s barn, her spider, her pig. Years later,
reading the book again to her little boy, she sees basically the same barn,
the same pig, and the same spider, who happens to be writing words in
her web.

By its very nature, if you’re writing a memoir and you aren’t famous, an
object of prefabricated interest, you must make yourself interesting to your
readers, and often you do so by amplifying the drama of your specific experi¬
ence (unless your story somehow clicks in with the interest of the larger
public, in which case whatever you write will be of momentary concern).
Fiction, though, must be interested in itself, must instruct in a precise but
unique way on how to see, and must leave room for the reader’s imaginative
capacity to rethink after the fact.

Forget education, I whisper. Educational fiction, or what I call
edufiction—fiction meant mainly to inform, to act as a kind of travelogue
for the middle-class reader—is of use, but only for so long. On the other
hand, to go into a fictive dream, into a world I do not know, and to feel
fully part of the imaginative experience; to draw from my own sense of
parenthood while watching a mother decide the fate of her child; or to be
with a woman who is locked into her particular historical moment, order¬
ing her boy out of the cellar while an insane white woman upstairs calls
for a hot-water bottle—I’ll take it. Give me anything but a sense that I’m
being educated.

I’m not sure that teaching empathy is the project of fiction, either. Does
it put the cart ahead of the horse to say it is so? An uncompassionate per¬
son reading Kafka would simply give up. One is under no obligation to
read the work. One has no obligation to work through To the Lighthouse,
or Corregidora, or The Brothers Karamazov. The compassionate reader
moves ahead. Certain stories yield to compassion with ease—whereas oth¬
ers move us to the edge, leave us there. Too much is demanded of the
reader—moving with the instructions given, having to imagine. Reading,

44 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

like anything, is a skill. We never stop learning to read—I assure myself,
my students. On the other hand, maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps a slightly em-
pathetic young person—with just a twinge of feeling for the

I Thou—finding the right fiction would be yearned into other

text. Maybe I’m totally wrong.

nherent in all shoptalk about writing, inherent in the questions
that are just different ways of asking “How do I get published?” is a sense
on the part of the student that there is some magical key, some single,
precise bit of advice that will unlock everything. All of those how-to
books on writing, all of those seminars, the vast Writing-Industrial
Complex stretching from coast to coast. Programs. Festivals. Retreats.
The pretense of professionalism: take art, a lonely, abject, incredibly
hard thing—a gift in the deeper form, as described by Lewis Hyde,
something passed on to other people and not meant as some kind of ex¬
change but meant to be passed forward to someone else—and turn it
into a profession, a lineup of resume-ticking points, from panels to
teaching gigs to award juries. Why puncture this dream by questioning
it? I whisper to myself.

Many writers I admire—from Saunders to Nelson to Danielle Evans—
work, or have worked, inside the Complex, and many writers, myself in¬
cluded, teach creative writing at the undergraduate level. My students at
Vassar are testing the waters, not looking for the key that will magically
unlock their professional futures. When I’ve read manuscripts submitted
for university writing prizes, I’ve often found that many of the under¬
graduate submissions were stronger than the graduate work. They
weren’t as polished, but that’s what made them strong; they lacked the
industrial sheen and took greater risks.

Perhaps I’m a type. I like to believe that my work has nothing at all to
do with the world of academia, or that of pedagogy, or prompts, and comes
out of something—I whisper—much deeper, more profound, and more
connected with the lonely, hapless souls, the lost, the weary, the troubled,
the fucked-up, the disconnected who, like certain people in my life, didn’t
draw a card that said: I’m gonna be in a story, part of some larger product
of someone’s process.

The rules that I make, the regulations, are going to emerge out of my
own situation, my own needs, and therefore, because they are true within
the confines of the work, can never be foreseen, and, man, the voice
whispers, if a creative-writing class is anything, it is anticipation of the
foibles of future works—advice is, inherently, given ahead of action, even
if it seems to be in the context of something already done, as in revision.
No, even advice on revisions is still an attempt at prophecy, and the
magic of creation is that it takes place within the imagination, unfore¬
seen, a surprise.

We need to bring the word Muse back into the lexicon, to respect the
fact that, since antiquity, we have searched for a way to articulate in words
what is, essentially, a mystery. Each writer has a particular list of inspira¬
tions, and I realize that many also have external voices that accompany
them along the path toward creation—and for some the external support
might be more necessary. But at the edge of creation, alone at the key¬
board, no matter how many voices you have accompanying you, there is
that moment, before you begin to hear the story in your head, before you
push the key and create the word, when you are alone with your own
voice and vision and work. It centers in on your imagination, on what
you’re seeing, on what you’re envisioning, and, without it, the magic mi¬
metic thing that fiction does, giving the reader precise instructions on
how to see, doesn’t happen. I can attest to this because, years ago, I held
my babies in a hospital and looked into their eyes and felt the already-told
story of how that feels, the sensation of truth in the moment, and I do
know that love is love no matter what boundaries it must cross. ■

Inherent in all shoptalk

ABOUT WRITING IS A SENSE THAT
THERE IS SOME MAGICAL KEY THAT
WILL UNLOCK EVERYTHING

ESSAY 45

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LETTER

FROM

GUATEMALA

DESTINED FOR EXPORT

The troubled legacy of Guatemalan adoptions

By Rachel Nolan

F ive years ago, Jean-
Sebastien Hertsens
Zune went looking for
his parents. He already had
one set, a Belgian church or¬
ganist and his wife, who ad¬
opted him as a baby from
Guatemala and later moved
the family to France. But he
wanted to find his birth
mother and father. When
Zune was a teenager, his Bel¬
gian parents gave him his
adoption file, holding back
only receipts showing how
much the process had cost.

Most people pay little atten¬
tion to their birth certificates,
but for adoptees, these docu¬
ments, along with notes about
their relinquishment, tell an
often patchy origin story.

The paperwork said that
Zune’s birth parents, Alfredo
Gonzalo Cajas Barrios and
Rebeca Natividad Lopez
Ramirez, lived in a small town near the
Guatemalan border with Mexico. Al¬
fredo had signed the consent form with

Rachel Nolan teaches history at the Society of
Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia Uni-
versity. Her most recent article for Harper’s
Magazine, “Innocents,” appeared in the Oc¬
tober 2017 issue. Research for this article was
supported by the Fulbright Program, the Social
Science Research Council, and the American
Council of Learned Societies.

his name. Rebeca had dipped her finger
in ink and signed with a thumbprint.
The reason given for relinquishment
was that Zune had been born with a
clubfoot and his birth parents could not
afford medical treatment. But his adop¬
tive parents told him that his foot had
been fine when he arrived in Belgium
as a baby. Why had Alfredo and Rebeca
really given him up for adoption?

At the age of twenty-
seven, Zune moved to Gua¬
temala and rented an apart¬
ment in Antigua, the former
colonial capital laid out at
the foot of a dormant volca¬
no, with another volcano
throwing up smoke in the
distance. The city is popular
among foreigners because it
is a cheap and picturesque
place to learn Spanish, with
sixteenth-century church
ruins and bougainvillea
climbing the sides of adobe
homes. At night, big, chat¬
tering black birds called
zanates settle into a single
tree in the city’s central park,
and the gringos and Guate¬
malans gather to dance salsa
clumsily. Zune took intensive
Spanish classes in a tile-
roofed house with a court¬
yard filled with flowers, and
began to use his pre-adoption
name: Alberto.

By the time he arrived in Antigua,
Zune had already led a roving life—
working as a bricklayer, a pizza slinger,
and an airport information officer in
Bosnia, Italy, Poland, and France. He
earned a master’s degree in interna¬
tional business but hadn’t found a
way to use it. Zune has a restless en¬
ergy that keeps him from staying in

Illustrations by Brian Hubble. Source image of Alberto Jean-Sebastien

Hertsens Zune and his adoptive parents. Courtesy Alberto Zune LETTER FROM GUATEMALA 47

one place for long. He speaks five
languages, most with local slang and
imperfect grammar because he
picked them up by ear. Guatemalans
looked at him strangely when he
spoke Spanish with drawn-out,
frenchified vowels. He looked like he
could be local, but no one guessed
that he was from Guatemala. “Bra¬
zil?” they would ask.

After two weeks in Antigua, Zune
felt he spoke enough Spanish to com¬
municate, and he set out for Catarina,
the place listed in his adoption file as
his birth parents’ home. Catarina is a
small town in the southwestern corner
of the country, an area through which
the migrant caravans recently crossed
on their way to the United States.
Zune convinced a new Guatemalan
friend to accompany him by motorcy¬
cle on the eleven-hour trek.

T he road to Catarina begins
smoothly, rising from Antigua
through pine forests where in¬
digenous families carry firewood up
mountain paths on their backs, with
tumplines looped over their foreheads
bearing the weight. Then it becomes
dangerous, as trucks, cars, and motor¬
cycles pass one another around blind
curves. The worst offenders are the
“chicken buses,” worn-out American
school buses painted in bright colors
and repurposed as intercity transpor¬
tation. As the road descends from the
mountains into San Marcos, the pines
give way to banana trees and the trop¬
ical heat of the border zone rises. Ca¬
tarina is just a few streets crossed to¬
gether in an area known for drug
trafficking, where teenagers serve as
lookouts for small-time narcos.

Before arriving, Zune had written
to the Belgian Embassy, which put
him in touch with a Belgian priest
who had lived in the area for decades.
The priest gave Zune the current ad¬
dress of his birth father, Alfredo, who
was now married to another woman.
At the address, Zune and his friend
found a concrete-block house set back
from the street. Alfredo, a slight man
with an intense gaze, answered the
door and welcomed them effusively,
professing himself delighted to see Zune
again. “I’ve always remembered you, my
son,” he said. “I never thought you
would come back.”

Alfredo invited Zune to stay at
his home in Catarina for several
days. At family meals, Alfredo intro¬
duced Zune as his son, not mention¬
ing the adoption but simply saying,
“He’s a son who went away.” Every¬
one assumed this meant that Zune
was the product of an affair, which
would not be at all unusual. Alfredo
didn’t want to talk much about the
past, but he was curious about Zune’s
life. How long could he stay in Gua¬
temala? What had his life in Europe
been like? Did he make good money
at his jobs there? Zune stumbled
along in Spanish, and his friend did
his best to translate and help smooth
the encounter.

Zune reveled in a feeling of be¬
longing. A photograph from this
time shows Zune smiling shyly with
his hands in his pockets in Alfredo’s
living room. Alfredo’s wife, with a
pinched smile, has her hand on
Zune’s shoulder.

At the end of his stay, Zune an¬
nounced that he was going back to
Antigua, but said he would return
to visit often. Alfredo told him he
was welcome anytime, but that it
would be best not to seek out his
birth mother. “She’s a bad type of
person,” Alfredo told Zune, insinuat¬
ing that she might even be involved
with the narcos. “She won’t want to
see you.” He would not say why.

Zune hadn’t come all the way to
Guatemala to meet only one of his
parents. He returned to Catarina a
few weeks later, alone on the chicken
bus. Rebeca lived on a small ranch
just outside town. Her house was
large enough only for a bed; the rest
of her belongings—a table, a wood-
burning stove—were arrayed on the
grass outside. Rebeca was home, and
she invited Zune in. Here, finally, was
his mother. His first thought was that
she looked older than her years. “I
was so happy,” Zune recalled.

But Rebeca told him that there
had been un error, a mistake. “I’m not
your mother,” she said. Zune’s Spanish
was not perfect. Maybe he had misun¬
derstood. “Look, ma’am,” he said, “you
are in my adoption file. It says here
that you are my mother.” But Rebeca
was insistent. “I only signed for you,”
she told him, “nothing more.” A long
time ago, she said, a powerful neigh¬

bor had forced her to pretend to be
Zune’s mother. The neighbor brought
her to a lawyer’s office in Guatemala
City, where she consented to Zune’s
adoption. She didn’t know how to
read or write, so she signed the papers
with a thumbprint.

The neighbor who forced her to
sign the paperwork was Alfredo Gon-
zalo Cajas Barrios. Rebeca told Zune
that the man who was posing as his
father was rumored to be a child traf¬
ficker. People in the area said he had
earned money finding children for
lawyers in Guatemala City who ar¬
ranged international adoptions. His
wife, whom Alberto had met, had
been involved in the adoption busi¬
ness, too, as well as the illegal impor¬
tation of cars from Mexico.

Rebeca was religious, and what
she had done had always bothered
her. She said she had no idea who
Zune’s parents were. She had only
signed adoption papers that one
time, but other women may have
done it for Alfredo, too. She was
very, very sorry. Alfredo had threat¬
ened that if she ever told anyone
what she had done, terrible things
would happen. She warned Zune to
be careful.

Rebeca spoke spontaneously, and
Zune was inclined to believe her.
After thinking it over for several
weeks, he decided to confront Alfredo.
He took Alfredo’s whole family out
to Domino’s Pizza at the shopping
mall in Malacatan, a nearby town,
and, in the food court, next to the
ball pit for kids, Zune told Alfredo
that he had met Rebeca and asked
for the truth. Alfredo claimed that
Rebeca was lying. They had been to¬
gether for a short while, he said, and
this really was Zune’s family. If Re¬
beca claimed that he was not the fa¬
ther, “maybe she had been unfaith¬
ful,” he suggested.

Zune, confused and unsettled,
went back to Antigua. He started
contacting adoptee support groups
for help, and found that he was not
alone in his predicament. He learned
from lawyers working with a non¬
profit organization that the adoption
agency that had handled his case,
Hacer Puente (“Make a Bridge”), was
known to have placed children who
were stolen from their birth parents

48 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

with French and Belgian couples in
the 1980s. The agency no longer ex-
isted, but the father and daughter
who ran it had been named in seven
al lawsuits. Zune was convinced that
Rebeca was telling the truth. But if
he wasn’t from Catarina, where was
he from?

Zune had always believed that his
birth parents gave him up voluntarily,
but now he could not be sure. “I think
about them out there, looking for me,”
he told me. “I just want to talk to my
real mother for one second,
to find out if she gave me up
because she wanted to or be-
cause she had to.” When the
lawyers in Guatemala City
asked him whether he want¬
ed to open a criminal inves¬
tigation into his adoption, he
said yes.

Z une is one of tens of
thousands of Guate¬
malan children who
were adopted abroad over the
past several decades. Be¬
tween 1996 and 2008 in par¬
ticular, Guatemala, a small
country of 17 million people,
was one of the world’s top
sources of adoptive children
for families in the United
States. “Some countries ex¬
port bananas,” a Guatemalan
congressman told The Econo -
mist in 2016. “We exported
babies.” Regulations were
exceedingly lax, and it has
now become clear that some
of those babies were traf¬
ficked, and many others had
their files falsified to speed up
the process. Some children were stolen
outright, often from poor, indigenous
women in rural areas. A small number
were abducted by nurses, who told the
mothers that their babies had died in
childbirth. In many cases, adoption
lawyers working with foreign agen¬
cies paid women to coerce mothers
into relinquishing their children.
Guatemala began prohibiting for¬
eigners from adopting in 2008, and
thousands of families there have be¬
gun piecing together what happened
and searching for their lost children.
Zune is part of a wave of adult adop¬
tees who are now returning to Gua¬

temala to face disconcerting revela¬
tions about their pasts.

Adoptions from Guatemala began to
rise during the country’s civil war, a
conflict that was stoked by the United
States. In 1954, the CIA backed a mili¬
tary coup overthrowing Guatemala’s
democratically elected government,
which had passed land reforms curtail¬
ing the United Fruit Company’s semi-
feudal control over the countryside. The
coup resulted in a decades-long back¬
lash. From 1960 to 1996, a small Marxist

insurgency squared off against a series
of right-wing military dictatorships. A
United Nations-backed truth com¬
mission later found that at least two
hundred thousand people were killed
in the war, the vast majority of them
indigenous Maya. Soldiers, police, and
death squads seized people by the light
of day, hustling them into vans and
later tossing their mutilated bodies
onto the street as warnings. The United
States supported the dictators with
military equipment, which was re¬
routed through Israel when human
rights abuses became too egregious for
Congress to swallow. The generals

most infamous for torture and mass
murder were trained at the School of
the Americas at Fort Benning, in
Georgia. At the height of the killings,
in 1982, Ronald Reagan flew down to
Guatemala and said that the then
dictator, Efrafn Rfos Montt, was “a
man of great personal integrity” and
was getting “a bum rap.”

Rfos Montt claimed that indige¬
nous people in Guatemala were par¬
ticularly susceptible to guerrilla influ¬
ence, so scorched-earth campaigns
against whole villages were
necessary. “The guerrilla is
the fish. The people are the
sea,” he proclaimed. “If you
cannot catch the fish, you
have to drain the sea.” (Near¬
ly all Guatemalans have Ma¬
yan heritage, but around
40 percent of the population
is considered indigenous be¬
cause they speak Mayan lan¬
guages or wear traditional,
hand-woven clothing.) Rfos
Montt also happened to be a
Pentecostal Christian, con¬
verted by a group based in
California. He appeared on
television every Sunday to
give long sermons on the im¬
portance of family values
even while he ordered mas¬
sacres against indigenous vil¬
lages, from which surviving
children were stolen. One
former social worker told me
that, in the 1980s, the Gua¬
temalan Army would bring
staff from the Ministry of
Social Welfare in helicopters
to the sites of massacres to
pick up the children. These
children were then held in state or¬
phanages and put up for adoption, of¬
ten with incomplete information about
the identities of their birth parents or
their places of origin.

The Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide, signed in 1948, defines
genocide as including not only massa¬
cres of ethnic groups but also “forcibly
transferring children of the group to
another group.” This is a little-known
provision, though the tactic has been
used often. Nazi Germany had a pro¬
gram called Lebensborn (“Font of
Life”) that identified and kidnapped

Source images: Housing on a plantation in southwestern Guatemala, 2015

“racially pure” children throughout
occupied Europe. The children were
placed with “Aryan” families as part
of the eugenic plan to germanize the
continent. Nazi officials burned
adoption files at the end of the war,
so the extent of the program is un¬
known. From 1976 to 1983, during
the Dirty War, Argentine Army offi¬
cials stole an estimated five hundred
children of “subversives” before mur¬
dering the parents and raising the
children or assigning them to child¬
less right-wing families. Francisco
Franco’s fascist government in Spain
also kidnapped thousands of chil¬
dren and gave them to families loyal
to the regime. In Guatemala, the
transfer of children was not the re¬
sult of a top-down campaign, though
it was an expression of extreme rac¬
ism against indigenous people dat¬
ing back to the Conquest. A 2010
report from the Guatemalan Ar¬
chives of Peace found that the dis¬
appearance of children during the
conflict was driven in part by the idea
of “destroying the seeds of future
guerrilla fighters.”

Wartime adoption files from the
state orphanages appear to have
been falsified in large and small
ways, especially those concerning
children “remitted” by soldiers and
police. Some children’s names were
changed and details about their pasts
erased. Other files show that family
members who came looking for the
children were turned away if they
didn’t have proof of kinship, such as
a birth certificate, which many poor
people in Guatemala lack.

But the vast majority of adoptees
did not pass through the state or¬
phanages. Using an infrastructure of
lawyers, middlemen, and connec¬
tions with foreign adoption agencies
that was created during the chaos of
war, the private sector built a thriv¬
ing commercial market for adop¬
tions. In 1977, the Guatemalan
Congress voted to allow adoptions
without judicial oversight; a private
lawyer could match a child to a fam¬
ily, fill out all the paperwork, and
get the process rubber-stamped by
the attorney general’s office. (This
system was unique in the world and
accelerated Guatemala’s adoption
boom; elsewhere, even the hastiest

and most slapdash adoptions were
overseen by state agencies.) A private
adoption was not cheap—it could
cost anywhere from $10,000 to
$40,000—but it was fast. Adoptions
through the state orphanages took
about two years to finalize, but pri¬
vate adoptions could take as little as
six months.

Adoption lawyers worked with
women called jaladoras, literally “pull¬
ers,” who found children for a fee—
usually several hundred US dollars
per child. According to a study by hu¬
man rights groups, jaladoras were of¬
ten women between the ages of twenty
and forty, the most valuable of whom
lived in the same communities as
their targets; many were poor and in¬
digenous themselves. Some jaladoras
stole children outright, but more of¬
ten they would approach young
mothers or pregnant women on buses
or at outdoor markets and try to per¬
suade them to give up their children.
They would flip through photo al¬
bums showing Guatemalan boys and
girls in the comfortable homes of
middle-class families in the United
States and Europe. Jaladoras would
promise to cover the cost of child¬
birth in a hospital or to pay for medi¬
cal care for other, older children.

Jaladoras became infamous for
their guile and deceit. One strategy
they used was to pretend to award
scholarships to the children of illiter¬
ate, indigenous women in rural com¬
munities. The mothers signed what
they thought were scholarship docu¬
ments, but they were actually adop¬
tion consent forms. The children
were taken to “school” and never
heard from again. One woman in a
tiny town called Aldea Guisilte-
peque told me that she had been the
only parent to sign up her child for a
program providing free school sup¬
plies, because everyone else feared it
would end with strangers taking the
children out of the country. (In this
case, the aid was real.) The woman
turned to her young son, who was
hanging around us listening, and
said to him, in what I hoped was a
joking tone, that he had better not
go away with me or I would “turn
him into soap.”

Because so many documents were
falsified, it is impossible to know

what proportion of adoptions were il¬
legal. Julio Prado, a former public
prosecutor at the attorney general’s
office who specialized in adoption
cases, estimated that although the
number of children kidnapped for
adoption was very small, the majority
of private adoptions were what he
called “gray,” involving some form of
coercion or fraud. When foreign
adoptions were suspended, in 2008,
the Guatemalan government ordered
an investigation of the 3,342 adop¬
tion cases currently in process and
found irregularities in more than
half of them.

Z une had intended to stay in
Guatemala for only a month,
but he skipped his return
flight to help with the criminal in¬
vestigation. By the time I met him,
he had been living there for two
years. He had moved from Antigua
to a less touristy neighboring town,
Jocotenango, and decorated his new
apartment with French and Guate¬
malan flags. When he invited me
over, there was little food in the
fridge and a lot of jarred protein
powder stacked on top of it.

Zune is what Guatemalans call
desconfiado, someone who doesn’t
trust easily. Even before moving to
Guatemala, he had an odd habit of
secretly taping conversations. He
showed me how he did it—by press¬
ing the record button on his phone
in his pocket without looking. At his
apartment, Zune played me the re¬
cording of his confrontation with
Alfredo at the mall. He had turned
over copies to the Guatemalan attor¬
ney general’s office, and he had given
a statement to the Belgian police,
who were working with Interpol to
investigate the adoptions handled by
Hacer Puente. He was obsessed with
the investigation, researching his
case for hours each day.

Zune’s problem was not just that
he didn’t know who his birth parents
were, but that he didn’t even know
what type of adoption his might
have been. Was he one of the ninos
de la guerral Had his mother been
tricked or coerced? Was she even
alive? Without the clues of language
or dress, it was hard to say whether
Zune was indigenous. Had he sur-

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

vived a massacre of which he had no
memory? The only person who might
know was Alfredo, and, for now at
least, he wasn’t telling.

Even once Zune was convinced
that Alfredo was lying to him, he
continued to visit Catarina. He grew
attached to Rebeca and brought her
little gifts, mostly food. Even if she
wasn’t his mother, he said, she had
had the decency to tell him the
truth. Alfredo was angry and hurt
that Zune had gone looking for Re-
beca, but he continued to treat him
warmly, denying that he had done
anything wrong. When Guatemalan
investigators asked Zune to try to
convince Alfredo to take a DNA
test, Zune called him and said only,
“I need to talk to you.”

Several days later, Zune, accompa¬
nied by two public prosecutors, set
out from Antigua early in the morn¬
ing in a black car with tinted win¬
dows. Zune had arranged to meet
Alfredo in the central park of Mala-
catan, but when Alfredo saw him
step out of the official car, he started
to back away. Zune motioned him
over, and Alfredo didn’t run. Zune
explained that they were here to
take him to the local health clinic
to swab him for DNA. Alfredo didn’t
want to go, but one of the officials
took him aside and spoke to him
alone. “Somehow, he convinced
him,” Zune said. They drove Alfredo
over to the health center. Alfredo was
angry, and also somehow wistful.
“I’m going to lose you,” Alfredo told
him before getting swabbed. The test
was negative.

Zune’s Belgian parents hadn’t be¬
lieved him at first when he told them
that he might have been stolen or
coerced away from his family. “They
kept thinking that Alfredo was my
father, that Rebeca was my mother,
that everything had been legal,” he
told me. The DNA test finally per¬
suaded them. They had known little
about the civil war in Guatemala,
but, as practicing Catholics, they had
an idea that they might save a child
from a desperate situation. The family
had adopted a total of four children,
each from a different country: Ethi¬
opia, the Republic of the Congo,
Colombia, and Guatemala. Like
many who adopted from Guatemala,

the couple did not know how chil¬
dren were selected and matched to
families. They simply paid a lump
sum to a lawyer for the adoption.
None of Zune’s siblings had any de¬
sire to find their birth families, nor
had they returned to their countries
of origin.

Zune’s adoptive parents told him
that one of the people who had fa¬
cilitated his adoption was a tall, ele¬
gant Guatemalan woman named
Ofelia Rosal de Gama. Rosal de
Gama was the sister-in-law of Gen¬
eral Oscar Humberto Mejia Vfcto-
res, the president of Guatemala
from 1983 to 1986. According to re¬
cords at the National Police Ar¬
chive, she had been arrested twice
for “trafficking in children,” once in
1983 and once in 1987. One mother,
identified as Evelia R. in court doc¬
uments, said that Rosal de Gama
had approached her at a market in
Guatemala City to ask whether she
would be able to support the child
she was expecting. Rosal de Gama
gave the mother bread and tortillas,
and eventually convinced her to
give the baby up for adoption.

Rosal de Gama was named in one
of the few pieces of investigative
journalism published about interna¬
tional adoptions during the war, in
El Grafico in 1987, two years after
Zune’s adoption. The article was ti¬
tled “Orphans of the Highlands:
Spoils of War?” The highlands are a
mountainous region in central
Guatemala, where the indigenous
population is concentrated. The
story began,

The discovery by the national police
of safe houses of children destined for
export has permitted the revelation of
one of the most painful facets of the
dirty war staged in Guatemala over
many years: the exploitation of or¬
phans as a valuable byproduct bound
to enrich the few.

Rosal de Gama appears as one of
the women assisting Army officials
to place children for adoption—
channels that ran through both the
private adoption system and state or¬
phanages. Her participation in
Zune’s adoption suggested that per¬
haps he could be a war orphan or
massacre survivor.

LETTER FROM GUATEMALA 51

Nnp York Revisited

Henry James
- ■

With intradHttien by Li mi H. Lji pha m

New York Revisited

BY HENRY JAMES

First published in Harper’s Monthly
Magazine in 1906

With an introduction by

Lewis H. Lapham

DISTRIBUTED BY MIDPOINT
TRADE BOOKS, A DIVISION OF IPG

Order online at store.harpers.org

Rosal de Gama was never convict¬
ed, but it is not clear whether she was
released from jail for lack of evidence,
under political pressure, or thanks to
a bribe. The court records fall off
without resolution. She died several
years ago—never having served a
prison sentence.

F or many years, the US Em¬
bassy in Guatemala City was
reluctant to acknowledge the
problem of adoption fraud, despite
the fact that it had granted tens of
thousands of visas to children ad¬
opted by American parents. Ac¬
cording to the journalist Erin Siegal
McIntyre, who wrote the book
Finding Fernanda about adoption
fraud in Guatemala, the embassy
was aware of problems as early as
the late 1980s. Through FOIA re¬
quests, Siegal McIntyre found that
in 1987 embassy officials learned of
a private nursery in Guatemala City
where children were sold to Ameri¬
can couples for $10,000 each. Ac¬
cording to the embassy documents,
the women who ran the nursery al¬
legedly traveled to the country’s ru¬
ral interior to “steal children.” The
embassy complained in a cable to
the State Department that it was
too understaffed to deal with wide¬
spread fraud, but Washington re¬
fused requests to assign more per¬
sonnel to adoption cases.

Later, the embassy instituted DNA
testing prior to adoption approval in
order to match children to the women
relinquishing them, a measure that
would have prevented Zune from be¬
ing taken out of the country. But, ac¬
cording to Siegal McIntyre, some of
these tests were falsified. Embassy ca¬
bles from the 1990s through the
2000s show concern about a spike in
fraud, but little action. On the rare
occasions when the US Embassy
slowed down adoptions for further in¬
vestigation and doubled up on DNA
testing, they received a flood of phone
calls from members of Congress who
were themselves getting angry calls
and letters from their constituents—
adoptive parents waiting for children.

While the United States waffled,
legitimate concerns about criminal
and semi-criminal adoptions led to
paranoia and panic in Guatemala. In

the early 1990s, rumors—which were
never proved—spread that some
children who were given up for adop¬
tion had been killed, their organs ex¬
tracted for sale on the international
black market. In 1994, Guatemala’s
leading newspaper, Prensa Libre, irre¬
sponsibly published a graphic that
resembled a butcher’s chart, showing
what it claimed were prices in US
dollars for children’s body parts. The
most expensive organs were suppos¬
edly livers at $150,000, followed by a
set of heart and lungs at $125,000;
pancreases at $90,000; kidneys at
$65,000; and corneas at $2,500. (In
Guatemala, per capita income that
year averaged $1,300; workers in ru¬
ral areas earned much less.) Hysteria
increased even though Prensa Libre
cited no sources. Several foreigners
who spoke to Guatemalan children
or took pictures of them were at¬
tacked by large crowds; at least two
were killed.

In the end, it was a combination
of public protest, the US Embassy’s
fear of ongoing scandal, and pres¬
sure from UNICEF that led to the
outright ban on foreign adoptions
in 2008. But Guatemala has been
slow to reckon with its history of
genocide, or connect it to the prob¬
lem of adoption fraud. In 2013, the
year before Zune arrived in Guate¬
mala, the former dictator Efrain
Rios Montt was indicted by the at¬
torney general and tried for geno¬
cide and crimes against humanity.
The prosecution cited adoption
files from the 1980s as evidence of
genocidal acts. Rios Montt was con¬
victed, but the judgment was later
overturned under political pressure,
and last year he died under house
arrest while awaiting retrial. Al¬
though the truth commission or¬
dered the Guatemalan government
to search for the five thousand chil¬
dren who were disappeared during
the war, no systematic effort has
been initiated. Former generals still
control the country, and genocide
denial is common.

Wealthy private lawyers who en¬
gaged in adoption crimes have mostly
gone free. If anyone went to jail, it
tended to be the jaladoras or the nan¬
nies hired by lawyers to look after
children before their adoptions. One

prominent exception is Susana Luarca,
a lawyer formerly married to a Guate¬
malan Supreme Court justice, who, in
2006, helped arrange the adoption
of a two-year-old girl who was report¬
edly kidnapped from her parents’
patio in San Miguel Petapa, south of
Guatemala City. When I visited the
parents, Loyda and Dayner Rodri¬
guez, they showed me the tiny dresses
that their daughter had worn before
she went missing, still folded away in
a chest of drawers. Over a decade
had passed.

I met Luarca in 2016 at the wom¬
en’s prison in Guatemala City. We
spoke in her private cell—a rare
luxury—where she keeps three for¬
merly feral cats, one of whom is
named after a reggaeton star. She was
wearing sandals and showed me her
perfectly manicured toenails, saying
she had enrolled in a beauty course
inside. “I’m the only one who does
the homework,” she said.

Luarca arranged her first adop¬
tion in 1984, for friends—a childless
American couple visiting Guatemala.
After her divorce, she told me, she
made a living facilitating hundreds
of adoptions through the private
system. Eventually she opened a
nursery for the children whose
adoption paperwork she was pro¬
cessing. “The fact that I adopted
two children myself is not consid¬
ered a mitigating circumstance. Nei¬
ther is the fact that I had the most
beautiful nursery where the children
were the best cared for,” Luarca told
me. At its peak, her nursery, in the
capital’s upscale Zone 10—four
blocks from the US Embassy—had
been staffed by uniformed maids
and held up to a hundred babies at
once. “Children don’t need much
space,” she said. Luarca did confirm
that she worked with jaladoras,
whom she paid for their services.
She did not scrutinize their meth¬
ods. Luarca told me she’s angry that
she doesn’t have more company in¬
side. Other lawyers, she said, did the
same things.

F amilies searching for disap¬
peared children in Guatemala
rely on a nonprofit organiza¬
tion called La Liga Guatemalteca de
Higiene Mental, run by Marco Anto-

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

nio Garavito. Garavito is a compact,
warm man with a mustache, who was
trained as a social psychologist. Even
before the war ended, he began to
quietly ask around about the where¬
abouts of children who had gone
missing or were taken by the Army.
Now he works with a small staff out
of an unmarked office in downtown
Guatemala City.

The work of reunifying families
is slow and difficult. Birth parents
and adoptees rarely speak the same
language, and Garavito struggles to
find regular translators for all
twenty-one Mayan languages. He
and his colleagues travel long dis¬
tances by jeep and on foot to gather
testimony in remote parts of Guate¬
mala where the war hit hardest.
“We haven’t been able to get every¬
where, so there are still stories that
aren’t known,” says Garavito. In Ar¬
gentina, a DNA database has been
the most important tool in helping
to find stolen children, but La Liga’s
irregular funding has meant that
they are able to match stories more
frequently than blood. Despite all
this, La Liga has managed to find
the families of 488 disappeared chil¬
dren. Thousands more families are
still looking.

Zune became friends with Garavi¬
to after dropping off a copy of his
adoption papers at La Liga, in case
he was a match with one of the fami¬
lies in their database. After review¬
ing Zune’s file, Garavito said it was
unlikely that he was a victim of the
civil war after all. The paperwork for
disappeared children—even forms
that have been falsified—generally
locates the children’s birthplaces in
the indigenous, highland regions of
Guatemala, not the border area near
Mexico. For Zune, it is hard to be
certain about anything. “According
to La Liga, my adoption wasn’t be¬
cause of the war, but due to private
trafficking,” he told me. “But how to
know for sure?”

La Liga’s archives are full of testi¬
mony from parents, often some vari¬
ation of the story told by the K’iche’
Mayan couple Felipe Sosa Sarat and
Maria Sarat Ordonez. In 1982, the
Guatemalan Army attacked their
town, and the couple fled up into
the mountains, getting separated in

the confusion. Felipe was shot in the
foot while carrying their four-year-old
son, whom he set down to seek help
and to try to find his wife. When he
returned, his son was gone. La Liga
discovered that soldiers had found
the child and taken him to a mili¬
tary base. He was then given to a
private orphanage called La Casa
del Nino del Quiche, where staff
changed his name, declared him to
be in a legal state of abandonment,
and gave him up for adoption to a
family in the United States. “I just
want him to know about everything
I did to search for him,” Felipe said.
“In spite of all the time that has
passed I love him just as much, if
not more.”

When La Liga does manage to
match a family to their missing
child, Garavito often organizes a
Mayan ceremony with candles, in¬
cense, and a spread of tamales. He
has started inviting Zune, who, under¬
standably, has become something of
the star of these ceremonies. When¬
ever he attends an event, he is sur¬
rounded by several rings of parents
at all times. One family from Nebaj
became convinced that Zune was
their son who went missing after a
notorious 1982 massacre. Garavito
had to break the news gently to
both the family and Zune that it
was not even worth doing a DNA
test, since he was too young to be
their son. “They still write me every
once in a while to see how I’m do¬
ing,” Zune told me. He recalled that
he sobbed openly when attending
his first reunification ceremony, but
now considers those events the
highlight of his time in Guatemala
because of all of the affection
shown to him by the parents. “They
are all missing children,” Garavito
said, “and he is the one who came
back. They like to imagine that he
is theirs.”

T here are many people in Gua¬
temala and abroad who believe
that international adoption
should be reopened. The highest-
profile advocate is Elizabeth Bartho-
let, an adoptive mother of two chil¬
dren from Peru and a professor at
Harvard Law School. Bartholet ac¬
knowledges that there is some fraud

SIXTIES

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE DECADE
FROM HARPER’S MAGAZINE

GEORGE

PLIMPTON

WALKER

PERCY

MCGINNISS

DAVID

HALBERSTAM

RICHARD

HOFSTADTER

C.VANN

WOODWARD

PRISCILLA

JOHNSON

MCMILLAN

SARA

DAVIDSON

LOUIS

LOMAX

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LETTER FROM GUATEMALA

in international adoption, but she be¬
lieves the response should be to ad¬
dress the illegality, not, as she put it,
to “shut the whole thing down.”
“There is a huge cost to be paid by the
children who are denied adoptive
homes and typically end up in insti¬
tutions,” she told me. The problem
with this view is that most of the
children adopted from Guatemala
were not orphans or street children,
but were sourced by adoption lawyers.
One journalist called the idea that
most international adoptees are or¬
phans “the lie we love.”

Some conservatives argue that
reopening Guatemala to interna¬
tional adoptions could help assuage
the current political crisis over mi¬
gration. The implicit argument is:
if Central American families had
the option of sending their chil¬
dren for placement with adoptive
families in the United States, the
whole family wouldn’t have to mi¬
grate. Fox News host Laura Ingra¬
ham, who adopted a child from
Guatemala right before the ban in
2008, brought up the idea in the
midst of last summer’s family sepa¬
ration crisis at the border. “We
should make adoption easier for
American couples,” she said. “Let’s
put our hearts out there for the
kids in the right way.”

Although the Trump Administra¬
tion claims it is seeking to reunite
families who have been separated at
the border, the Associated Press
found in October that some children
of deported Salvadoran mothers were
at risk of being processed for adoption
by families in the United States. The
AP investigation drew on immigration
records, interviews, and hundreds of
court documents to show that there
are “holes in the system that allow
state court judges to grant custody of
migrant children to American fami¬
lies without notifying their parents.”
One undocumented Guatemalan
woman in Missouri, who was arrested
in an ICE raid several years ago,
sued from prison to stop her one-
year-old son from being adopted by
an American family. A judge on a
Missouri Circuit Court found in fa¬
vor of the adoptive family, writing
about the mother that “smuggling
herself into the country is not a life¬

style that can provide any stability
for the child.”

I n December, I visited Zune one
last time. He was working at a
call center in Guatemala City,
making a good salary because he
could answer the phones in French,
and he commuted back and forth
from Jocotenango on his motorcycle.
After an overnight shift and a session
at the gym, he showed up to meet me
in black and neon-yellow athletic
wear and said he was taking herbal
supplements to keep his energy up.

Zune had written about his search
on Facebook, and other adoptees had
started to contact him for advice.
Many did not have the time or re¬
sources to travel to Guatemala but
were still hoping to find their birth
parents. Zune cautioned them that
opportunities to make money from
adoptions had not completely dried
up after they were banned. A num¬
ber of former jaladoras and others
now worked as “searchers,” locating
birth parents for a fee of about
$1,000 per case. One searcher I in¬
terviewed, who asked not to be iden¬
tified by name and emphasized that
she had not worked as a jaladora,
said that she had completed hun¬
dreds of searches, which often led
her to gang-controlled areas in Gua¬
temala City. “I’ve never found a
mother who was not poor or exceed¬
ingly poor,” she said.

Zune put other adoptees in touch
with Garavito and explained how to
look for family members without
paying a searcher. When I last saw
him, he had just hosted a twenty-
eight-year-old French adoptee, Mario,
in his apartment for three weeks,
and they had a great time eating pe-
plan, a national dish, and buying
handwoven textiles. “He even ate
tortillas,” Zune said. Tortillas are one
thing Zune never got used to about
Guatemala, despite the fact that they
are served with every meal. “In my
house,” Zune told me, “there will
never be tortillas.”

Zune told me that his case had
been presented in June before a
panel of Guatemalan judges and
that the public prosecutors were
close to an arrest warrant for Alfre¬
do. He has joined several other Bel¬

gian adoptees in a lawsuit against
the people who ran the adoption
agency, Hacer Puente, with a lawyer
who has prosecuted drug traffickers
in Belgium. In the meantime, Gua¬
temalan public prosecutors had giv¬
en Zune closure, of a kind. They
still didn’t know who his birth par¬
ents were, but told him they are
“ninety percent sure” he is Mexican,
not Guatemalan.

In the 1980s, Mexican children
were often brought into Guatemala
for easier and more profitable adop¬
tions. “Everything links me to that
trafficking network,” Zune told me.
The public prosecutor, Oscar
Galvez, did not want to reveal more
information while the investigation
was ongoing. Jul io Prado, the for¬
mer public prosecutor, said that, al¬
though he hadn’t worked directly
on Zune’s case, it was also possible
that Zune was the son of a sex
worker, since the border zone sees a
lot of prostitution. If so, Zune’s
mother may even be from another
Central American country—
Honduras, Nicaragua, or El Salva¬
dor. Malacatan, the largest town in
the area, was and remains a crossing
point for migrants into Mexico on
the way to the United States.
“Many Central American women
migrating to the US ran out of
money and stayed,” Prado told me.

I asked Zune whether, if it turned
out that he was Mexican or from
another country, he would move
away and start a new life again. “I
swear on my parents, I swear on
God, or whoever, that I won’t,” said
Zune, laughing. “I came here, I’ve
got all the paperwork, I’m not going
to reject Guatemala.”

Every time I talk to Zune, he says
that he is planning to move back to
Europe within the next few months.
And every time I go back to Guate¬
mala he is still there. Zune has been
saving money to build a small
house, and he has his eye on a plot
of land near his current apartment.
He was recently offered a job in
France and is considering accepting.
If he goes, he says, he will still buy
the plot in Guatemala and will
probably retire there one day. He is
no longer bothered by having two,
three, even several lives. ■

54 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

ESSAY

WORKS OF MERCY

The power of pastoral care
By John Crowley

T hirty-two years ago my new¬
born daughter was discharged
from Boston Children’s Hos¬
pital after an operation to repair a
congenital birth defect and a lengthy
period of recovery. Her mother and I
had prepared for this—we knew the
diagnosis from the ultrasound, had
done the research you could do in
1986, asked the questions we could
learn to ask—and got a good outcome.
We went home to the western end of

John Crowley is a contributing editor of
Harper’s Magazine. Reading Backwards, a
collection of essays and reviews, will appear
in August.

the state to raise twin daughters, one
with a major disability (“our third
child,” her mother says), and found
ourselves in a system whose existence
we hadn’t known of: Early Childhood
Intervention. Physical therapists, psy¬
chologists, licensed practical nurses,
and the state and public-private agen¬
cies that supplied and paid them. They
cared for our child, but more than
that, they taught us how to, and the
teaching was as much mental and
emotional—call it spiritual—as it was
practical. They taught us to watch, to
observe, to learn this particular child;
to have patience, not to see too much

and fall into useless anxiety, not to see
too little and miss the signs of trouble.
Close watching actually changed our
experience of time. I learned what
mindfulness meant, even if my practice
of it fell short.

Above all, these women (they were
nearly all women) were advocates.
They advocated for the child to the
parents: you have to do this well.
They advocated for us to the agencies
for which they worked and to those
that had aid to distribute. They
taught us to be advocates too, in prep¬
aration for inevitable emergencies and
likely further hospitalizations.

The Doctor, by Sir Luke Fildes © Tate, London

ESSAY

It’s well known now that going into
a hospital for anything more than the
most routine procedures without an
advocate is risky. An advocate need not
necessarily be someone expert in the
proliferating possibilities of medical
response but must be good at asking
questions and understanding answers,
someone who knows the patient thor¬
oughly, not simply the malfunction at
hand or the complication that’s arisen.
Someone who can interpret to the
medical staff who this patient
is when—whether from dis¬
ease or fear or confusion—she
is unable to be herself; who
knows what her tolerances
and aversions are, and why it
will make for a better outcome
to treat her in this way and
not that way. I have witnessed
such an advocate (my wife, L.,
actually) intervening to pre¬
vent the medical team from
making an error, which can
take courage.

Medical teams now ac¬
knowledge the value of this
kind of advocacy, even when
it demands extra time from
them; they want the likely
outcomes of treatment, the
drawbacks and the possibili¬
ties, clearly understood. They
want to respect patients’
wishes, and they want their
own advice to be useful; they
want to offer options—but
how are patients and their
helpers to choose among
them? The greatest need for
help in this realm is at the
end of life, where increasingly there
are choices to be made. Montaigne
said we should not worry if we don’t
know how to die; Nature will do all
that for us, he said, we need give no
thought to it. But in today’s world it’s
often a matter of negotiation.

Despite the need, not everyone in
trouble can summon someone to their
side who’s good at the hard work of
guidance in this fraught environment.
It requires practice, discernment, skill
at listening and watching. What I have
been learning is that a corps of caregiv¬
ers exists and can be called upon to
help people and families in difficult
circumstances, even in facing loss of
function, absence of remedy, the suffer¬

ing and death of loved ones. They
aren’t part of the medical team, though
they often practice in that environ¬
ment; nor are they nurses’ aides or
home health care workers. The most
inclusive descriptor for what they are
said to provide is “pastoral care.”

Health care organizations increas¬
ingly recognize that meeting the spiri¬
tual needs of their patients is part of
their mandate, and hospitals must ad¬
dress these needs to receive national

accreditation. The provision of care
for the sick, disabled, and dying be¬
yond the strictly medical or therapeu¬
tic is now a career possibility with
many variant descriptions and catego¬
ries. As of this writing, the online
job-search aggregator Indeed listed
almost three hundred jobs in answer
to the search term “hospice pastoral
care,” including hospice bereavement
coordinator, spiritual care counselor,
board certified hospice chaplain, be¬
reavement counselor, and staff chap¬
lain. A search for “hospital pastoral
care” reached farther—over six hun¬
dred openings, from an associate
chaplain in spiritual care at Sanford
Health in Sioux Falls, South Dakota,

to a spiritual care minister at Sacred
Heart Hospital in Eau Claire, Wis¬
consin, as well as associate and assis¬
tant chaplains and resident chaplains
across the nation.

Pastors are shepherds, of course;
sheep and shepherds are common in
the Hebrew Bible, and are frequent
metaphors in the New Testament:
“Feed my sheep,” Jesus commanded
his followers. I see the term used not
only in the literature of Catholic insti¬
tutions but also that of Is¬
lamic, Protestant, and Jewish
groups. Hospital chaplains
are employees of their hospi¬
tals. They visit patients who
have selected a religious
preference upon admission,
though they will visit anyone
who might need their help.
When my daughter was born,
L. (from a Jewish family) and
I (with a Catholic upbring¬
ing) declined to make a se¬
lection; in the long period of
my daughter’s first stay in
Boston Children’s Hospital,
and then in subsequent stays,
I don’t ever remember seeing
one, and wouldn’t have
known how to respond if one
had looked in on us.

S usan Harris is a rabbi
certified by the Associa¬
tion of Professional
Chaplains, though she doesn’t
particularly like the word
“chaplain,” and “pastoral”
rubs her even more the wrong
way. “Jews don’t know from
chaplains,” she said to me. This doesn’t
mean that the work is undefined in
Judaism—it is. There are seven chap¬
lains presently at work daily at Boston
Children’s: three Protestants, two
Catholics, one Muslim, and Susan
Harris. It was only recently that the
hospital hired a Muslim chaplain, but
the need for one would be obvious to
anyone walking through the luxurious
new public areas of Boston Children’s:
like many top American hospitals, it
treats people from around the world,
and from the Au Bon Pain to the Fam¬
ily Center and the spectacular anima¬
tion wall, children are almost always
there with their mothers—in their
arms, in strollers—and one can log an

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

The Sisters of Mercy, by Henriette Browne © Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany/Bridgeman Images

amazing variety of head coverings,
hijabs, and burkas, from lavish to plain.

I met Susan Harris when my now
adult daughter returned to Children’s
for a procedure that turned out to en¬
tail far more time and anxiety than had
been forecast. The situation called
upon all of those watchful waiting skills
L. had learned in the early years of
motherhood, and which in time she has
used on my and her own behalf as well.
We hadn’t named a religious preference
at admittance this time either, but the
rabbi noticed that on a floor under her
purview was someone who’d been there
over a month. Any patient who’s been
in a hospital room for a month, Harris
thought, needed a visit. She was
welcome; she was a civilian, someone
outside the medical team taking an
interest; my daughter was glad to talk
about nonmedical matters, just
talk. We all needed the company.

Later on, in the cubbyhole office
she shares with a large printer, Har¬
ris took time to talk to me about
her role. A compact, cheerful
woman, and a mother herself, she
lives near enough to bike to work.
She’s an ordained rabbi, with an ad¬
vanced degree in Judaic studies, but
a “pulpit-free” one, she says. “I don’t
consider anybody I see a member of
my congregation. That word implies
a certain relationship. As a congre¬
gant you expect something from your
clergy, you expect leadership. To the
extent that I do any leading, I lead
from behind. For Jewish families it’s
actually an advantage that I’m not a
pulpit rabbi; I don’t push anybody’s
buttons—I don’t see them as absent
from my pews—and that makes a
difference to me.”

Harris thinks of herself as a “pro¬
fessional stranger on the bus,” some¬
one to whom people can pour out
their hearts because most are never
going to see her again. “I am witness
to what they’re going through. People
need to make meaning out of the ran¬
domness or purposefulness of their
lives, and in order to make sense out
of your story, even to know what your
story is, you have to have someone
who can listen. I’m often the person
people can practice telling their story
to, until they figure out what it is. Is it
one of loss, is it one of redemption, is
it one of punishment, is it one of frus¬

tration? Sometimes the story gets re¬
framed along the way, which is why I
keep going back.” Some of those she
visits see their stories through the
lens of theology, and she can do that,
claim that authority—if someone asks
a rabbi question she’ll give a rabbi an¬
swer. But if the question is why is this
happening, she’ll claim her own limi¬
tations as a human being. “In the mo¬
ment, there is no reason good enough
for why this should be happening. I
don’t think ‘why’ questions are help¬
ful. And when it’s something of epic,
tragic proportions ... I believe that
even if God, God’s self, gave me an
answer, it wouldn’t be good enough.”

Harris thinks of herself

AS A “PROFESSIONAL STRANGER ON
THE BUS,” SOMEONE TO WHOM PEOPLE
CAN POUR OUT THEIR HEARTS

Harris’s daily work is plainly more
active than this suggests. Patient and
family troubles around illness and treat¬
ment can generate psychic suffering
every day, and it is in this realm that
Harris might be able to intervene. “I
see this place as a laboratory,” she said.
“In every room the same thing is hap¬
pening: loving parents, a child who’s
sick. But different
people have very
different reac¬
tions.” She makes
a distinction be¬
tween pain and
suffering: young
children, like
anyone, can feel
pain, and it can
be anguishing;
suffering requires
consciousness, a
sense of what
ought to be the
case but isn’t. “A
young man, Jew¬
ish, a wonderful,
remarkable man,
was in to have a surgical bolt removed
from his hip. He showed me the hard¬
ware. It made me woozy—it was this big.
His parents were in the room, literally
wringing their hands, and he looked at

them and said, ‘Mom, Dad! It’s just
pain!’ He was in pain. They were suf¬
fering. We’ve all got pain; suffering is a
layer over that.”

One of Harris’s challenges is par¬
ents who see their role as demanding
the best for their child and rousing the
medical team to give them definite
answers about outcomes. “Families
want control over what happens.
Hospitals talk about giving parents
more control. But we aren’t ever truly
in control—if you were truly in con¬
trol you wouldn’t be here.” The parents
are her concern too, and she tends to
reach them through her attention to the
kids: just talking, as a receptive friend
would, to children stressed by their
parents’ anxiety. Often she’ll ask
young children, What’s your favorite
thing about being in the hospital? Not
a question you could ask a grown¬
up, but a child will name the pet-
therapy dog, or the artist-in-residence
who decorates their room’s wide
windows in finger paints, or the
game room. The mere presence of
a disinterested person can lower the
tension in the room. “I’d like to see us
develop more capacity for acceptance,”
Harris said. “Chill! I’m not a passive
person. But there is more struggle than
there needs to be.”

My last question to Harris that day
was about death. Death is of course
common in hospitals, but in a chil¬
dren’s hospital it is
surely more devas¬
tating. She paused
before answering.
“There’s a Jewish
concept—but it’s
not only Jewish—
that we are stew¬
ards of our lives; we
don’t own them.
That children are
actually guests in
our home, and we
are caretakers for
them as long as we
are needed.” Har¬
ris once learned of
a man caring for a
teenage son with
a severe heart problem in a room on
the same floor of Children’s where the
man’s elder son had died of the same
condition some years before. Harris
offered to help get him a room on

The Sick Child, a painting of Madame Eugene Carriere and son, Leon, by Eugene Carriere
Courtesy Musee d’Orsay, Paris © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York City

ESSAY 57

another floor, but he declined; he was
glad to be where his elder son had
been. He was a wonderful boy, the
man told her, and it was a privilege to
have known him. “It matters,” Susan
Harris said to me. “All of this matters.
It matters that a parent sits beside a
child for months in illness. And I
think there should be one person as-
serting to parents that it does matter.”

Harris has seen, she told me, many
deaths: of newborns unable to thrive,
whose fate is awful but who have
hardly been alive at all; and—far
more grievous—of older children and
adolescents who can understand a lit¬
tle of what they will never have. Most
of the children, though, remain un¬
afraid, blessedly unable to feel the
tearing knowledge of loss and the ex¬
istential dread that grown-ups can.
Every death is sacred, and to be a wit¬
ness to it is a privilege. “Personally,”
she said, “I take comfort from the
fact that so many before me have
successfully died.”

The Children’s Hospital Harris
works in isn’t quite the place my fam¬
ily came to in 1987. Even then it was
only one of the many large medical
facilities that filled the Longwood
Medical and Academic area (the
LMA), a 213-acre site near the River¬
way in Boston: there’s Brigham and
Women’s (where our twins were born),
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Beth
Israel Deaconess, Harvard Medical
School, Massachusetts Eye and
Ear Hospital, and more. It’s far
larger now, and growing denser
every year. New hospitals, care
centers, and research facilities are
constantly being built, and older
ones are being refitted or convert¬
ed, merged or expanded. Out of
the 2.3 million patients seen every
year in the LMA, nearly 100,000
are inpatients. Eighty-one percent
of the 57,000 people working in
the area are in health care.

Visit any major hospital center
in the country and you’ll see—in
every clinic, lab, family area, re¬
covery room, and passageway—
the name of the individual donor
or donors who made that feature
possible. (L. often pauses to read
them, to wonder who they are.)
Major givers now, though, are of¬
ten banks, corporations, and

foundations that attach their names
to entire wings, requiring changes to
the old nameplates and creating
what can only be called luxury hos¬
pitals, striking in their design, large
public areas, and wards filled with
original art and uplifting messaging.
A visit to one can be like visiting a
corporate headquarters, and perhaps
for that reason the style is familiar
and reassuring to some. At Chil¬
dren’s, the pretty little Prouty Gar¬
den on the ground floor, created in
1956 by a bequest from the then
well-known author Olive Higgins
Prouty to be a place where children
in treatment and their parents could
see grass and trees and flowers—a
place as restorative and healing as
any chapel—was recently removed
so that another tower of wards and
clinics can be built. The garden was
still there when my daughter was on
the mend during her last stay, and
she took a visiting friend down to it.
She noticed a man—a parent, she
assumed—sitting in the sun, head in
his hands, in tears.

I n the Catholic moral system there
is a list of works of mercy enjoined
on believers. These are broken out
into two kinds, seven of each: the cor¬
poral works of mercy and the spiritual
works of mercy. The spiritual ones in¬
clude praying for the living and the
dead, comforting the afflicted, admon¬

ishing the sinner, and so on; the cor¬
poral works instruct us to feed the
hungry, give drink to the thirsty,
clothe the naked, harbor the harbor-
less, visit the sick, ransom the captive,
bury the dead. They have been incor¬
porated into Christian practice as Chris¬
tian, but similar precepts are included in
the 613 Mitzvot of Judaism and in Is¬
lamic practice; in fact they would seem
to be human universals, and to need no
explicit divine commandment.

Mercy isn’t compassion, though it
can be prompted by compassion. In
Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism
the recipient of an act of corporal
mercy is understood to be—usually
unknown to the giver—identical to
the divine ordainer of the command¬
ment of mercy. “He who attends on
the sick attends on me,” declared the
Buddha, when he washed and
cleaned a monk lying in his soiled
robes, desperately ill with dysentery.
Jesus said the same: “I was naked and
you clothed me, I was sick and you vis¬
ited me, I was in prison and you came
to me.” A hadith warns Muslims that
on the day of Resurrection Moham¬
med will say, “O son of Adam, I was
ill but you did not visit Me.”

Works of mercy might involve
nothing more than tithing, or writ¬
ing checks to charities. But the acts
that Jesus and the Buddha describe
require the provider to engage fully
with the sufferer, to suffer with, as

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

Spring, by Edvard Munch © The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway

some spiritual counselors term it,
and therefore to become one with
the sufferer—to undergo, or accept,
or allow in: which is what to suffer
means. Sister Melinda Pellerin of the
Sisters of St. Joseph, the pastoral
minister at Holy Name Church in
Springfield, Massachusetts, used the
term “walk with” when I went with
her on her rounds—one of those spa-
tial metaphors for spiritual work that
seem universal: walking, journeying,
accompanying, carrying burdens,
coming to a crossroads.

Springfield is a once-wealthy manu¬
facturing city that has declined steadi¬
ly over many decades, losing jobs and
businesses. It has a historically deep
African-American community and a
large immigrant population. Sister
Melinda’s visits to the people of her
parish, which is now as Hispanic as
it was Italian and Irish in her youth,
sometimes take her to Baystate
Medical Center, an old Springfield
hospital now vastly enlarged by—
among other expansions—a wing
mainly funded by the insurance
firm MassMutual. Mostly, though,
her visits are to modest neighbor¬
hoods in the city.

The religious women who provide
most Catholic pastoral care—
educating children, visiting, nursing,
dispensing charity, organizing prayer
for all the living and the dead—are
far fewer now than in the past, and
the ones active now tend to do the
work differently. Sister Melinda re¬
ceives a salary from the Holy Name
parish, lives in a house with four of
her sisters, and spends a good part
of every working day in her car. She
visits the Women’s Correctional
Center in nearby Chicopee two days
a week as chaplain.

Sister Melinda knew from her
childhood that she wanted to be a re¬
ligious sister, but she wanted other
things too. Her family had come from
Louisiana to Springfield, where she
was born, and she grew up in Holy
Family parish, whose redbrick church
is now closed. She went to college, got
a master’s degree, taught history, was
married, lost her husband to cancer,
and only then, at the age of fifty, en¬
tered the order. Vatican II had
changed the lives of religious sisters,
and for Sister Melinda it was all to

the good. The first African American
in the Holy Name congregation, she
wears everyday clothes, and only a
small silver crucifix on a chain; she’s
devoted to Pope Francis. She has a
delightful and genuine laugh, and the
ways of the old church she and I grew
up in get their share.

On my first visit with Sister Me¬
linda, we climbed the steep stairs to
Lucy’s tidy apartment, a small two-
family not far from the church. Lucy
was eighty-five and lived alone with
her bird; her unmarried grandson lived
below, and Lucy had just learned that
he had fathered a child. Another
grandson was in prison. Lucy had been
prescribed an antianxiety medication
by a neighborhood clinic, but it made
her dizzy and afraid of falling. She had

What SHE DOES CAN SEEM SIMPLE,
A FRIENDLY VISIT, BUT ITS POWER FOR
THOSE SHE VISITS IS LARGE. THEY ALL
TESTIFIED TO THEIR NEED FOR HELP

gone that day to the optician to find
that the glasses she was to pick up
were twenty dollars more than she’d
been told, and she had to hand over
the money she had brought to buy bird
food. Sister Melinda listened, gave
advice, asked whether Lucy was get¬
ting help up and down the stairs. “For
a long time she was afraid of the
stairs,” Sister Melinda told me later.
“She didn’t feel able to get to Mass.
But she got her courage back, and her
grandson and her son help. I see her at
Mass now—she catches my eye, gives
me a little wave.”

Not all of Sister Melinda’s cases are
parishioners, or even Catholics. My
Sister’s House, for women recovering
from substance abuse, is open to all,
and Sister Melinda meets with the res¬
idents monthly. She gathered the do¬
nated sewing machines the women
meet to use as they practice skills and
support one another’s goals. We went
to a rehab facility—“not the high-end
kind; this is for those with limited
resources”—where she visited Dan, a
recovering addict whose habit had led
to blood sepsis, from which he nearly
died. A small, buff, rather fiercely ex¬

act man, he’d been staying at Mi¬
chael’s House, a private facility estab¬
lished by the family of an addicted
man who committed suicide. There
are fourteen residents at present, gov¬
erning themselves; Sister Melinda
checks in once a week. Most have re¬
lapsed, some many times; she’s well
aware of the odds. Two of the men
from the house were visiting Dan
when we arrived—a Baptist and a Lu¬
theran. They all got hugs from Sister
Melinda. Everybody gets a hug; they
solicit one if she looks to forget. At
the end of our second day together I
got one, too.

What is it that she does? It can seem
simple, a friendly visit, but its power
for those she visits is large. They all
testified to her goodness and their
need for her help. She’s not a thera¬
pist; she’s not a certified chaplain
like Susan Harris or a professional
spiritual care provider. Her training
is “hands-on,” she says, earned on
Chicago’s North Side when she was
a novice, and through volunteering
in a desperately poor region of Ja¬
maica at a bare-bones orphanage.
Sister Melinda helps make ap¬
pointments and recommends services,
but mostly she walks with Lucy and
Dan, or sits with them and converses,
unhurried; the mercy lies in her evi¬
dent selflessness, her plain good
cheer—the mere fact that she does it,
and that they depend on her to do it.
The spiritual is the practical.

I n 1945 over half of Americans
who died did so at home. The per¬
centage is greater the farther back
you go; a horror of hospitals was com¬
mon in the nineteenth century, as
they were believed to be places that
mostly killed you rather than cured
you, an assessment for which there
was plenty of evidence. Those sick
and dying at home received visits
from the doctor; in the once-famous
Victorian painting The Doctor by Sir
Luke Fildes, a doctor sits by the make¬
shift sickbed where a child lies; his
grave and wise watching suggests how
little else he can do.

Over the course of the twentieth
century came modern death, which
increasingly happened in hospitals,
then in ICUs or emergency rooms or
rehab facilities, in open wards or in

ESSAY

private or semiprivate rooms, with ro¬
tating teams of doctors and nurses and
an ever-growing array of options for
intervention. The common hope and
expectation of patients, caregivers,
and families was that something could
be drawn from that array that would
deliver the person from death for some
period, short or long, if the bewildering
and often dreadful suffering attendant
on the procedures could be endured,
and if the erasure of personhood with
drugs could be endured when the suf¬
fering could not. Death after such exer¬
tions could seem to both doctors and
survivors like a defeat, a robbery.

The destructive consequences of
heroic measures repeatedly undertaken
with little or no chance of success,
whether urged by doctors or demanded
by patients, are now well documented
and taken seriously in medical prac¬
tice. Attitudes are changing, in part
as a result of doctors speaking about
these things more frankly—and hum¬
bly. The numbers choosing hospice,
watchful waiting, and palliative treat¬
ment at the end are constantly rising;
in his 2014 book Being Mortal, Atul
Gawande asserts that the percentage
of deaths at home or out of the hospi¬
tal is approaching the percentage of
seventy years ago:

Whereas deaths in the home declined
from a clear majority in 1945 to just
17 percent in the late eighties, since
the nineties the numbers here re¬
versed direction ... by 2010, 45 per¬
cent of them died in hospice care.

A move from medical care to hos¬
pice care requires doctors to certify,
and the patient and family to ac¬
knowledge, that the end of life is
near. But though the papers and the
internet are now crowded with ad¬
vice about how to face mortality,
avoidance (in not admitting its im¬
minence, in not speaking Death’s
name around the mortally ill, in rap¬
idly consigning the remains to non¬
existence with the least fuss possible)
remains the default. Doctors and
medical professionals can be conflicted
about it as well. Gawande’s account
of his own coming to understand
death as a possible successful out¬
come doesn’t say much about the
very large cohort of men and women
who serve as guides, comforters, and

advisers to the dying and (just as im¬
portantly) to those who will remain.

I had the idea—not uncommon
maybe—that hospice signified a place,
a facility to go to when this process
was decided upon. But hospice is not
a place; it’s a program—minimal treat¬
ment for diseases in their last stages,
palliative measures to treat pain and
anxiety, at-home or homelike circum¬
stances rather than hospital ICUs.
There are small hospice centers, mostly
connected to religious foundations; but
for the most part people in hospice are
at home or in care facilities, and the
hospice nurses and counselors come to
them, making rounds like the doctor in
Fildes’s painting—or visiting the sick
and the dying, as my own father, a
doctor, once did.

R ebecca Richards, now retired,
was a hospice chaplain in Bal¬
timore for twenty years, and
says that she is still “amazed at the
mystery and hilarity and beauty of
life.” When she’d tell people what she
did, they tended to shrink away a bit—
they’d tell her it’s wonderful that she can
do that but they never could; it must be
so terribly hard. But it isn’t, she says. It’s
joyful. There are those, both patients
and relatives, who are offered hospice
care at home and at first refuse it. “They
shrink from the idea of a death in the
house,” Richards said, “how it would
linger there.” But usually they find they
can deal with it. “Most of the time rela¬
tives, family, friends show up to do their
part. They don’t always do it well, but
they do show up.”

Richards’s father died of lung can¬
cer at fifty, when she was twenty-nine.
When I met Richards, her mother
was in a hospice program, and Rich¬
ards was caring for her at home.
“She’s very clear about what she
wants,” she told me. “She tells every¬
body she can’t do this any longer, she
wants to die, to go home to her Cre¬
ator, and see her husband and loved
ones there. Her other daughters live
close. It’s kind of a best case.”

Showing families how to speak
frankly and stay in the room is a big
part of what a chaplain, a hospice
worker, or a spiritual counselor does.
“If a mother asks, Am I dying? What
will happen to me then?’ and they an¬
swer, ‘Don’t think about that, Mom,

don’t go there,’ then they’re making
her journey harder and lonelier,”
Richards said. “Nothing that happens
in the dying process is not safe. We
are safe. There’s no need to panic. Ev¬
ery person who has ever lived has
died—it’s exactly as common an ex¬
perience as birth. But for conscious
beings it’s unprecedented, and can be
alarming and distressing. You have to
help them, the one dying and the fam¬
ily, to see that they are safe.” If the
process goes well, people come to see
that dying isn’t what they thought it
was. “It’s a huge transition for all—
but often the one who’s dying has al¬
ready made that transition.”

The word transition puzzled me,
because I could only hear it as mean¬
ing a transition from this life to the
next, but at length I understood that
it means the transition from being
an active, living, and doing person
with an expectation of more life, to a
dying person, with different work to
do on behalf of the self and others. It
may be that that work doesn’t get
completed in even the best circum¬
stances, and last questions go unan¬
swered, approaches are spurned—
certainly every spiritual counselor
has seen that. As transitions go, this
one’s not an easy one, but surely a
good death is worth seeking, no mat¬
ter what ensues thereafter.

When the basic conditions of tradi¬
tional death are met in the present—a
bed at home or a place of equivalent
peace and quiet; people around who
watch and help in simple ways—then
aspects of dying appear that were not
removed but only suppressed or disre¬
garded in the era of modern death.
Dying people in the bygone world
were said to have commonly seen
their dead relations or others known
to them—not in the hallucinatory
trips of the near-death experience,
but in the sickroom with them.
Those around the bed, who couldn’t
see the apparitions, were usually not
alarmed or even particularly sur¬
prised by these visitors. Sometimes
dying persons had visitations from
accusing ghosts, or were called to re¬
pentance, but mostly they derived
great comfort from their presence.

Perhaps, as more people attend dif¬
ferently to dying, these persons in the
corners of the room will become com-

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

mon again in stories of the passing of
friends and relations, and from these
stories new morals might be drawn.
Each of the spiritual advisers I talked
to has been told of such visitors. It
seems that the accusers are much
rarer than the comforters these days;
maybe antianxiety meds help. Rich'
ards told me of a man she attended in
a mobile home, undergoing a hard
death from cancer, cared for by his
wife. On one visit he greeted her with
a blissful smile. What is it? she asked
him. I’m just so glad, he replied, so glad
you’ve brought Bobby with you. He
continued in calm happiness until the
end of her visit. His wife later told her
that Bobby was their son, who a few
years before had stepped in front of a
truck on the highway.

The rabbi, the minister, and the
religious sister were all clear that
what lies beyond is no part of their
remit. If asked for prayers, they will
pray, and they are glad if thoughts
of heaven or further life comfort the
dying, but those who volunteer as
hospice helpers are warned in their
training not to use their work as an
opportunity to win souls for God—
though for some it’s the very reason
they signed on. Such moves are re¬
garded by the professionals as more
than inappropriate—as almost abu¬
sive, Richards said, because they in¬
terfere with and cross up the per¬
son’s own transition, which is all
that matters. Sister Melinda is glad
to visit anyone who asks for her.
Both Susan Harris and Rebecca
Richards say they have learned much
from Buddhist thought and practice
in recent years, and both see the ne¬
cessity of removing the self from their
encounters, to leave the ones they at¬
tend with the space they need to
make their own meaning out of life
and death.

That meaning gained will remain
for the living to have, and can be
salvific. In some cultures grief is
noisy, and people unburden them¬
selves of it in bewailing; in other cul¬
tures, silence or whispers; and in still
others, rituals are gone through to
assure a good journey beyond. If
death is well achieved the one who
dies is put away from us even as the
passing is mourned. Robert Pogue
Harrison, in his profound meditation

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SOLUTION TO THE
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NOTES FOR "PLUS
FOURS":

Note: * indicates an anagram .

i L

| L

e|d

FOUR-LETTER WORDS: a) a(NT)s; b) cape, two mngs.; c) co-in; d) co(l)d; e) D-is-H; f) [Joyc]
e-[Ki]lm[er]-s; g) log-y[ule]; h) [n]Oise; i) ones, two mngs; j) onto, hidden; k) [erjotic; 1) p[abst]-ale;
m) PE-A’s; n) pest[o]; o) plum*; p) ring, two mngs.; q) shoo, homophone; r) slip, two mngs.; s) sure*;
t) T.(i.e.)S.; u) tort[e]; v) tout, first letters; w) tsar, hidden; x) Y-egg.

ACROSS: 7. f(all)en; 8. lar[ge-car]gos; 9. M(illand)-an-(T)-a; 10. p(l)otty; 11. *; 12. L(inc)OL-n;
17. *; 18. homophone; 19. *; 22. ex-act; 23. s(l-l[asagna])age; 24- e(Pei)ra(rev.).

DOWN: 1. 0-(ha)il; 2. nigh-t[en]; 3. Ra-V[I]enna; 4- two mngs.; 5. homophone; 6. Or-sons; 13. *;
14- Leo-Nora; 15. *; 16. *; 20. [c]aller; 21. egg-on, pun.

ESSAY

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The Dominion of the Dead, tells us
what it is we do: “Just as burial lays
the dead to rest in earth, so mourning
lays them to rest in us.” Burying the
dead is mercy too. The living and the
dead can rest in peace.

T he totalizing of the hospital
environment can be so over¬
whelming and disorienting
that those who come for care risk be¬
ing reduced to things, a process that
modernization always risks; though
treated with great skill and effective¬
ness, you can still be harmed. You
can call it trauma, but it’s harm to
the spirit and needs spiritual care.
The novelist Chris Adrian (The Chil¬
dren’s Hospital ), a palliative-care phy¬
sician and also a graduate of Harvard
Divinity School, remembers being
“struck during chaplain training by
the notion that by employing chap¬
lains the hospital had made a commit¬
ment to act against its own tendencies
to not listen to and not really care
about its patients.” If we don’t have soul
supports we can find ourselves alone in
modernity, adrift in treatment-time and
treatment-space, without meaning, just
when modernity has learned that such
supports are worth paying for. Adrian
suspects that “most pastoral care in the
medical context is being practiced by
non-chaplains and non-clergy. Pastoral
care as practiced by chaplains is a spe¬
cial iteration of a more general practice,
which I am almost brave enough to call
pastoral medicine.”

Pastoral care is now a mature system
in itself, trending toward spreadsheet
management of its agency-employed
friendly visitors, certified paraprofes-
sionals, secular confessors, graduates of
the Islamic Ziyara spiritual care educa¬
tion network, nuns with advanced de¬
grees in pastoral ministry, and trained
strangers on the bus. Richards is con¬
cerned that the corporatizing of hos¬
pice programs will result in damage to
the good care that matters to her. “Five
years ago a national for-profit provider
bought the group where I had worked
for fifteen years. They eliminated the
local office’s chaplain and social work¬
er positions. Instead, they call each
patient from the central office fifty
miles away and do the assessments by
phone, offering a visit ‘if necessary.’”
The group she worked for when we met

didn’t do that. It provided good and
loving care, though she would have
liked to have the staffing to provide
something closer to what was possible
back when she was a local church pas¬
tor, when she might have visited a
bedside two or three times a week, or
daily at the end of life. But perhaps the
balance is right in the end.

A system of corporal works of mercy
organized into specialties and paid for
by insurance and Medicare depends
for its success on human qualities that
not everyone possesses. These quali¬
ties are hard to select for or to instill,
but their lack can be quickly dis¬
cerned by those who have been sen¬
sitized by need. A pivotal moment
for Chris Adrian’s chaplain-training
cohort came when they looked
around the conference room and re¬
alized they were administering and
accepting pastoral care from each
other. “It transformed everyone’s prac¬
tice immediately and reduced dramat¬
ically the sense of fakery we all had.”
At the beginning of her career, Susan
Harris worked at Massachusetts Gen¬
eral Hospital, where she often visited a
very old woman who as a child had
been sent to a concentration camp;
she had a number tattooed on her
arm. “Not everyone who touched me
in the camps was bad,” she once told
Harris. “And not everyone who
touches me here is good.”

With luck it will be a long time till
my daughter needs a visit from Susan
Harris, or her counterpart in whatever
institution she finds herself in. May she
be glad of her, or him. Even now I would
myself be unwilling to sign up for chap¬
lain visits when it’s time for my transi¬
tion, but it’s clear to me that this elabo¬
rated pastoral-care system whose
margins I have explored is a good or at
least hopeful thing, and anyway it’s
what we have in this secular and frag¬
mented age and place. Dependent as it
is for its worth on the wisdom and good¬
ness of others, it’s really not that differ¬
ent from what we have had all along,
and perhaps it’s the best we can ever
hope to have in trouble and pain. “To
Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,” William
Blake wrote, “all pray in their distress”:

For Mercy has a human heart,

Pity a human face,

And Love, the human form divine,

And Peace, the human dress. ■

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

REVISION

MORE THAN A DATA DUMP

Why Julian Assange deserves First Amendment protection

By James C. Goodale

L ast fall, a court filing in the
Eastern District of Virginia in¬
advertently suggested that the
Justice Department had indicted
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The Wall Street Journal, the New York
Times, and other outlets reported soon
after that Assange had likely been se¬
cretly indicted for conspiring with his
sources to publish classified govern¬
ment material and hacked documents
belonging to the Democratic National
Committee, among other things.

As a veteran of major free-press le¬
gal battles, I waited, throughout the
days that followed, for journalists to
come to Assange’s defense. A few reli¬
able advocates, such as the ACLU and
the Knight First Amendment Insti¬
tute, did sound the alarm, but the edi¬
torial boards of the Times and the
Washington Post remained silent.

The Columbia Journalism Review
allowed that Assange’s prosecution
“could be a slippery slope that
would threaten traditional journal¬
ists and publishers,” but it was quick
to note that WikiLeaks was a “shad¬
owy organization” and “not officially
a journalistic one.” (Of course, there
is no body, not even the CJR, that
determines what is “officially” a
journalistic outfit.)

James C. Goodale is the former general coun¬
sel of the New York Times and the author of
Fighting for the Press.

Overall, the same mainstream jour¬
nalists who have treated Donald
Trump’s disparaging tweets about them
as unprecedented threats to their free¬
dom handled Assange’s indictment as

a political story, another piece of the
ongoing Trump-Russia saga.

In fact, the Trump Administration’s
prosecution of Assange represents a
greater threat to the free press than all
of the president’s nasty tweets combined.
If the prosecution succeeds, investigative
reporting based on classified informa¬
tion will be given a near death blow.

J ulian Assange started WikiLeaks
in 2006 with the stated purpose
of providing a place for newswor¬
thy information to be released on a

confidential basis. The site came to
widespread international notice a few
years later, when Assange obtained
thousands of classified documents re¬
lating to the Iraq War from US Army
soldier Chelsea (nee Bradley) Man¬
ning. Assange in turn shared these
documents with Le Monde, El Pais,
Der Spiegel, the Guardian, and the
Times, each of which separately edited
and published what they’d received.

Amid the furor surrounding this
publication, politicians from across
the political spectrum—Senators Di¬
anne Feinstein and Joseph Lieberman
among them—called for Assange’s
prosecution. Barack Obama’s Justice
Department seriously considered in¬
dicting Assange under the Espionage
Act and convened a grand jury for
that purpose. The legal theory behind
such a prosecution involves charging
Assange with conspiring with Man¬
ning to release classified materials.
Using this “conspiracy” theory, the
Espionage Act would be made to ap¬
ply to a reporter—not directly but
indirectly—by using the reporter’s re¬
lationship with sources. In other
words, the reporter would be made re¬
sponsible for the actions of his sources.
(Manning was eventually convicted
under the Espionage Act for leaking
to Assange.)

The Justice Department has been
enamored of this conspiracy approach

Illustration by Ricardo Martinez

REVISION

since the time of the Pentagon Papers.
In that case, Richard Nixon’s DOJ
attempted to enjoin the New York
Times and, later, the Washington Post
from publishing a forty-seven-volume
Defense Department study of the his¬
tory of US relations with Vietnam
from 1945 to 1967, which had been
classified top secret. I led the team of
lawyers who defended the Times in
that case. I had advised the Times that
the government would attempt to en¬
join publication and thereafter would
attempt to prosecute the Times crimi¬
nally. I also advised the Times that it
would win any case brought against
it in the Supreme Court, on First
Amendment grounds.

In June 1971, the Times published
three installments of the papers and
was enjoined from further publication,
as I had predicted. The Washington
Post then picked up where the Times
left off, and both papers ended up in
the Supreme Court, which ruled
in their favor. The court’s decision is
now widely considered a legal land¬
mark, since it effectively determined
that no injunction could be brought to
stop publication of classified material.

The ruling did not, however, deter¬
mine that newspapers or their report¬
ers were immune from prosecution af¬
ter the fact. Following the Supreme
Court’s decision, attorney general
John H. Mitchell convened a grand
jury in Boston to determine whether
there was a conspiracy among Times
reporter Neil Sheehan and others
with respect to the publication of the
Pentagon Papers. After a year and a
half, the Justice Department gave up
and dissolved the grand jury.

S ince Assange has already pub¬
lished the leaks in question, he
obviously cannot be stopped
from publishing them now; all the
government can do is prosecute him
criminally for obtaining or publish¬
ing the leaks in the first place. To
date, there never has been a criminal
prosecution for this type of behavior.
Obama’s Justice Department ulti¬
mately concluded that a prosecution
of Assange would damage the First
Amendment. Their decision effec¬
tively meant that Assange was entitled
to the same constitutional protections
given reporters. (A Washington Post

story about this decision quoted
Obama officials who referred to the
“New York Times problem”—i.e., the
fact that any precedent set with re¬
spect to Assange could be applied to
traditional journalistic entities.)

Trump’s Justice Department has
reversed course on this decision.
When Jeff Sessions first came into
office as attorney general, he said
that one of his top priorities would
be going after Assange. Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo—then the direc¬
tor of the CIA—said, “It is time to
call out WikiLeaks for what it really
is: a non-state, hostile intelligence
service often abetted by state actors
like Russia.”

While no one knows what’s in the
DOJ’s indictment, it is highly proba¬
ble that it names Assange as a co¬
conspirator not only in connection
with the Manning leaks but also in
connection with the leaks of emails
stolen from the DNC and from Hill¬
ary Clinton’s campaign chair John
Podesta, as well as the leaks of classi¬
fied information detailing the CIA’s
ability to perform electronic surveil¬
lance (the so-called Vault 7 matter).

With respect to the DNC/Podesta
leaks, Assange is in the crosshairs of
special prosecutor Robert Mueller,
who apparently believes that he may
have conspired with Russian intelli¬
gence and perhaps additionally with
members of the Trump campaign to
leak the emails. Assange denies
both that he received the emails
from Russian intelligence and that
he provided information to the
Trump campaign.

Mueller’s January indictment of the
former Trump campaign adviser Roger
Stone alleges that Stone tried to com¬
municate with Assange through two
intermediaries: radio host Randy
Credico and political commentator Je¬
rome Corsi. After laying out these al¬
legations, Mueller indicted Stone for
lying about his contacts with Credico
and Corsi, and for attempting to get
Credico to lie before Congress about
their conversations. In a later filing,
Mueller contended that he had exe¬
cuted search warrants on accounts
that contained communication be¬
tween Stone and “Organization 1,”
understood to be WikiLeaks. (Stone
has pleaded not guilty to all charges.)

Not all of the facts about the
DNC leaks have come out yet, so it
is hard to know exactly what As¬
sange did. If he explicitly agreed to
act as a Russian agent, he should lose
his First Amendment protection. On
the other hand, if he did no more
than what he did with Manning—
receive the documents and publish
them—he should have that protec¬
tion. The same is true with respect
to the Vault 7 matter: the facts con¬
cerning these leaks are not known,
but the application of the conspiracy
theory to these leaks is presumably
the same as in the DNC hack.*

S hould Trump’s Justice Depart¬
ment succeed in prosecuting
Assange, the only safe course
of action for a reporter would be to
receive information from a leaker
passively. As soon as a reporter ac¬
tively sought the information or co¬
operated with the source, the reporter
would be subject to prosecution. Na¬
tional security reporting, however, is
not done by receiving information
over the transom. It is naive to think
that reporters can sit around waiting
for leaks to fall into their laps. In a
recent interview, the longtime inves¬
tigative reporter Seymour Hersh told
me that he obtains classified informa¬
tion through a process of “seduction”
in which he spends time trying to in¬
duce the source into giving up the
information. If he isn’t allowed to do
that, he says, “It’s the end of national
security reporting.”

It’s clear that the Justice Depart¬
ment believes such “seduction” creates
a conspiracy between the leaker and
the reporter. In its prosecution of the
State Department employee Stephen
Jin-Woo Kim for leaking classified
information about North Korea to a

* Assange may also be indicted for assisting
Edward Snowden’s flight to Russia, since
Sarah Harrison, an Assange adviser,
accompanied Snowden on that flight. It
has yet to be proved that Assange directed
her to do that. Regardless of how this
charge plays out, it should not disturb
Assange’s First Amendment protection
for his other actions. Additionally,
Assange was arrested on Swedish rape
charges in 2010; his current asylum in the
Ecuadorian Embassy in London began
after the UK attempted to extradite him on
those charges in 2012. In May 2017,
Sweden dropped the charges.

64 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

Fox News reporter, James Rosen, the
DOJ stated, in a sealed affidavit, that
it considered Rosen a “co-conspirator”
The DOJ filed the affidavit with the
D.C. District Court in 2010 to gain
access to Rosen’s email, which
showed him persuading Kim, asking
for the leak time and time again un¬
til Kim finally relented. The affida¬
vit was unsealed three years later,
to the shock of Rosen and many
other journalists.

When Fox News angrily protested
that Rosen’s First Amendment rights
prevented him from being a co¬
conspirator, the Obama Justice De¬
partment assured Fox that it would
not prosecute him. If this type of
conspiracy theory were to be applied
in a criminal trial, a court would end
up examining every effort by a re¬
porter to obtain information. It
would criminalize the reporting pro¬
cess. Reporters and their publishers
would argue that the First Amend¬
ment protected news-gathering ef¬
forts such as Rosen’s, but the result
would be in doubt in every case.

If reporters can be indicted for
talking to their sources, it will mean
that the government has created the
equivalent of a UK Official Secrets
Act—through judicial fiat, without
any legislative action.

G iven the threat the Justice
Department’s actions against
Assange pose to the First
Amendment, why haven’t more
journalists, press organizations, and
editorial boards jumped in to sup¬
port him? Principally it is because
journalists dislike what he is doing;
they don’t believe he is a “real” jour¬
nalist and therefore do not see him
as entitled to the same protections
they enjoy.

Writing in U.S. News and World
Report, for example, Susan Milligan
says, “[Journalism] requires research,
balance and most of all judgment....
Dumping documents—some of them
classified—onto a website does not
make anyone a journalist.” Add to
this my own experience of when I
was attacked several years ago by a
howling mob of A-list journalists led
by the late Morley Safer at a party
(for my own book) where I said As¬
sange, as a reporter, was entitled to

First Amendment rights. “He is just a
data dumper,” I was told—and most
everyone there agreed.

But he’s not just a data dumper. He
edited the Manning leaks initially,
holding back some material. He may
have done the same thing with his
other leaks, including the Vault 7 re¬
leases. For better or for worse he seeks
out information to be published on
his website the way other journalists
do for their publications. He is a pub¬
lisher and is entitled to the same First
Amendment protections as any other.
Nonetheless, in the eyes of establish¬
ment journalists he remains a dumper,
as well as a rapist, a liar, a thief, and a
Russian agent.

One wonders whether the real
reason journalists will not support
Assange is that they simply don’t get
it. They don’t understand how a suc¬
cessful prosecution of Assange would
threaten their ability to report. I
would suggest that the focus of the
mainstream press should not be on
whether Assange meets the usual
definition of a journalist or whether
they approve of what he does. That’s
not the point. The point is that he
carries out the functions of a jour¬
nalist, has First Amendment protec¬
tions (as they do), and should not be
prosecuted for what he does. If he is,
we are all worse off for it. ■

April Index Sources

1 National Shooting Sports Foundation
(Newtown, Conn.)/US Census Bureau
(Suitland, Md.); 2 PETA (Norfolk, Va.); 3,4
Brookings Institution (Washington); 5 Smart
Politics (Minneapolis); 6 Southern Poverty
Law Center (Montgomery, Ala.); 7,8 Scott
Huffmon, Winthrop University (Rock Hill,
S.C.); 9 Embassy of France in the United States
(Washington); 10 French Ministry of National
Education (Paris); 11,12 Modern Language
Association (NYC); 13,14 US Department
of Education; 15 Computing Research
Association (Washington); 16 Lindsay
Bira, University of Texas Health Science
Center at San Antonio; 17,18 Amit Basole,
Azim Premji University (Bengaluru, India);
19,20 Association of American Publishers
(Washington); 21 Andrew Guess, Princeton
University (N.J.); 22-25 Pew Research Center
(Washington); 26,27 US Bureau of Labor
Statistics; 28,29 Yale Program on Climate
Change Communication (New Haven, Conn.);
30 Roper Center for Public Opinion Research,
Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.); 31 YouGov
(NYC); 32,33 PricewaterhouseCoopers (NYC);
34,35 Spectrem Group (Lake Forest, Ill.); 36
Age Wave (Emeryville, Calif.); 37,38 YouGov;
39 Sara Mazrouei, University of Toronto.

“One helluva team of
writers has produced a
book you’ll be dipping
into for years.”

-JIM BOUTON, AUTHOR OF BALL FOUR

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MEMOIR

NIGHTMARES AT
20,000 FEET

On the dread of looking down
By Lisa Wells

A bout six years ago, in
Iowa, after taking off in a
puddle jumper during a
tornado, I developed a sudden and
debilitating fear of flying. I was
seated across the aisle from a large
farm boy in military fatigues who
giggled with the first violent
pitch. “Don’t worry,” he said, to no
one in particular. “In these little
planes you feel every bump.” Mo-
ments later, we were tossing like
an aluminum can on an angry
sea, and he reached over to grip
my hand. I looked into his terri-
fied eyes; his face was pale and
glistening with sweat. “MAAM,”
he shouted. “WE ARE GOING
TO MAKE IT.”

He was right, we did make it,
but on every flight since, I have
acutely felt the nothing beneath me.
Upon takeoff, intrusive images of the
plane exploding cinch my anus tight
as a coin purse and inhibit my ability
to breathe. A sheer drop feels immi¬
nent from even the calmest skies.
Because I do not understand aero¬
dynamics, flight is inconceivable. My

Lisa Wells is a writer living in Seattle. She is
the author of The Fix, which won the Iowa
Poetry Prize.

attempts to research the subject only
produce more fear. I feel as though my
doubt about the possibility of flight is
enough to bring us down, the distance
between me and the earth closing on
command of thought alone. And how
has climate change affected the atmo¬
sphere? Can we be sure the old rules
are still working?

This is the madness my phobia
induces—if you must call it a phobia.

While flying, I can’t imagine any¬
thing more rational than the
spectacular panic skipping
through my blood. I don’t under¬
stand how anyone on the plane
reads or dozes, their faces ghastly
in the glow of their tablets. If my
fellow passengers gave a moment’s
thought to the question of how it
is this enormous, leaden contrap¬
tion transgresses gravity—via
what? Some ornate manipulation
of ether?—we’d all scream the
whole way.

But because my desire to be a
reasonable person capable of con¬
ducting a normal life exceeds my
aversion to flight, I have adopted
strategies that allow me to con¬
tinue taking planes. One useful
trick, picked up from the unfor¬
tunately named Captain Stacey
Chance, creator of the “Fear of Flying
Help Course,” is to calibrate my fear
against the faces around me, particu¬
larly the faces of the flight attendants—
faces that are, with rare exception,
unperturbed. Another of my tricks is
to sit at the window over the wing, as
it helps me judge the relative stability
of the plane against the horizon dur¬
ing turbulence. Left unchecked by

THE BEST FOOD WRITING FROM HARPER'S MAGAZINE

these procedures, the paranoid doom
cycle interprets most environmental
stimuli as death omens.

“Anxiety may be compared with diz¬
ziness,” observed Kierkegaard.

He whose eye happens to look down
into the yawning abyss becomes diz¬
zy. But what is the reason for this? It
is just as much in his own eye as in
the abyss, for suppose he had not
looked down.

I have resolved to not look down.

S ome months ago, in the C
concourse of the Las Vegas
airport, I was boarding a flight
bound for Seattle when the little
door at the end of the jet bridge
opened and a mechanic appeared.
The man was bald, but for a few
pasted strands, and zipped into too-
small coveralls, lending him the ap¬
pearance of a giant muscular baby.
As he cut in front of me, I tried to
meet his eyes, but they were reso¬
lutely downcast. He wobbled toward
the cockpit, and in that limbic in¬
stant I understood something was
off. Then the smell hit me. The
man reeked, as if he’d bathed that
morning in vodka. Good God, I
thought, he’s absolutely smashed.

I believed this man was a death
omen, and I wished to narc him
out, or else selfishly turn on my
heel and get out of there, but I’ve
felt the same urgency about a tired-
looking pilot (is it possible to fall
asleep at the joystick?); about a last-
minute change of plane (Rumsfeld
logic: Good to avoid the proven
malfunction, but what of the new
unknown unknowns?); about the
overrepresentation of elderly pas¬
sengers on a plane, who have lived
long enough, and so curry no favor
with an interventionist God. (Con¬
versely, an abundance of small chil¬
dren soothes the nerves.) I did not
dare report the mechanic, because
I’ve learned the hard way to dis¬
trust my own perceptions.

Around when the bell rang indi¬
cating our arrival at ten thousand
feet, a loud squealing sound un¬
furled from the front of the plane.
Minutes passed. One couldn’t help
but notice a lack of activity in the
cabin. No flight attendants feeling

their way up the tilted aisle, no
doors slamming on beverage service
carts. The squealing went on un¬
abated. It seemed we were slowing
down too soon. Leveling off.

“Hey, folks. From the flight deck.
Just want to let you know we’re aware
of the sound in the first-class cabin.
We’re not sure what’s causing it, but
rest assured the plane is ... uh, fully
pressurized ... and safe to fly.”

The plane began to descend. I re¬
membered my training and looked to
my neighbors, their faces alert but
otherwise inscrutable. Useless to me.
We leveled off again, floating then,
slow and low over a vast agricultural
patchwork. The body is trained to
expect specific experiences in flight,
and this combination of altitude and
speed was wholly foreign. The sea¬
soned business commuters among us
began comparing notes: flights aborted
for mechanical issues, for monsoons.
But even they, these coolest of cus¬
tomers, appeared to be distressed.

“Hey, folks. Good news and bad
news—”

A shriek of feedback.

“For Chrissakes,” a man ex¬
claimed, a few rows back.

Our plane was taking a hard left,
as if along the edge of a framing
square. The other passengers began
looking to one another, and to me,
with wide-eyed alarm.

“Sorry about that. The good news
is we got the noise to stop. The bad
news is, they don’t want us in the air
so we’re diverting to Oakland.”

Beyond the scratched acrylic oval
dividing my fragile personal biology
from impersonal physical law, I
could see we were approaching the
Sierra Nevada Mountains. At low
altitude, they are uncannily beauti¬
ful, like set pieces for a model train,
like intricately striated cake icing.
Only the level of detail is much
sharper, almost hyperrealistic, and
this strange, plastic realism distorts
perspective, like a dolly-zoom used
in film to incite disquiet in the viewer.
The eye can’t settle. My heart raced
the rest of the way.

Forty-five minutes later, I de¬
planed and made my way to the
bathroom, trailing a family of fellow
passengers. “That was pilot error!”
the man was angrily telling his wife.

MEMOIR 67

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“That was totally unacceptable.”
The wife’s shoulders caved with ap-
parent mortification. “Totally unac¬
ceptable,” he repeated. Was this
man a pilot himself? I doubted it.
Based on the way he roared his dis¬
pleasure at wife and son, I deduced
he was a professional know-it-all,
the dais anywhere his feet happened
to travel. He went on lecturing
them about what the pilot should
have done until I lost them in the
crush of the food court. To each his
own anxiety-management strategy.

I rewarded myself for having re¬
turned safely to earth with a box of
deep-fried food, and carried it back
to the now empty gate. As I
chewed, pleasantly doped, I reflected
on my desire to continue living.
Was this feeling of renewal an in¬
trinsic aftereffect of panic? Perhaps
my subconscious arranged for inter¬
mittent terror, so I could once again
experience the ecstatic flush of resur¬
rection? Then, I saw our captain
emerge from the Jetway flanked by
several crew. The crew blew by, aloof,
but the captain stopped at the desk
to address the gate agent, a tiny
middle-aged brunette. When she
turned from her screen to greet him,
he let go of his wheelie bag and
threw his arms around her, all but
hoisting her into the air, and held
her there a long moment, his eyes
pinched with emotion.

So it was just as I’d feared. We
were very nearly fucked.

I have been meditating on this
experience following last year’s
horror show of Southwest Air¬
lines Flight 1380, in which a fan
blade broke and an engine explod¬
ed, sending shrapnel flying, shatter¬
ing a window, depressurizing the
cabin, and sucking a passenger half¬
way out of the aircraft, killing her.
The passenger was Jennifer Riordan,
a forty-three-year-old Wells Fargo
executive and mother of two from
Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s said
that the blunt impact trauma ren¬
dered her instantly unconscious,
while the rest of the passengers had
a full twenty minutes to contem¬
plate their demise. Except they
didn’t die. The pilot made a heroic
landing in Philadelphia, and no one

else was badly injured. Even so, the
fulfillment of the nightmare has me
in the grip of its portent. It seems to
me there is little difference between
Riordan’s plane and any other vessel
traveling six hundred miles an hour,
several miles above the earth.
Death, in every case, is mere inches
from the living woman.

Watching our captain cling to the
gate agent, I’d felt betrayed. I
thought we had a bargain. The bar¬
gain was: I dispute my every thought
and feeling, and in exchange, I am
never placed in any actual danger.
What meaning, I wondered, should I
make of this?

Consider the CEO’s statement,
made on behalf of “the Southwest
family,” his extension of “deepest sym¬
pathies” for the loved ones of “our
deceased customer.” For it’s in the false
intimacy of the corporate “family,”
and the chilly legalese of “deceased
customer,” that I begin to locate the
greater resonance, the final meaning.
Flying, for the most part, is a banal
experience, and “customer” among the
most banal of words—a word of capi¬
tal and commerce. The beloved dead
are identified on tax forms and homi¬
cide reports by that most solemn des¬
ignation: deceased individual. The po¬
ets are dragged out of their garrets to
provide more floral polish: the tender
bud of youth flowers, withers, ulti¬
mately falls away. Or else the bud’s cut
short when, as the Slovenes say, the
lady with the scythe comes to visit. How¬
ever you want to dress it up, the only
meaning to be made is what I’d feared
all along. As one man reporting on
Riordan’s death would put it, and
bluntly, “Physics is uncompromising.”

Living is the risk the living take,
and we know the vessel only travels
one direction, though we try hard
not to know it. One can spend a
whole life talking about death, sim¬
ply by avoiding the subject. It is a
threadbare scrim that divides the
shrapnel from the fuselage, the cus¬
tomer from the corpse, my purport¬
edly irrational fear from life’s single
guarantee: its terminus. Without
that scrim, all is void; one long drop,
without a single surface to claw at or
reference, as much in our own eyes
as in the abyss. But who can resist
looking down? ■

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

STORY

SETTING THE WORLD

TO RIGHTS

By Amos Oz

Translated by Nicholas de Lange

11 his life he lived
on hatred.

He was a solitary
man who hoarded gloom.

At night a thick smell filled
his bachelor’s room on the
edge of the kibbutz. His
sunken, severe eyes saw
shapes in the dark. The
hater and his hatred fed on
each other. So it has ever
been. A solitary, huddled
man, if he does not shed
tears or play the violin, if
he does not fasten his
claws in other people, ex¬
periences over the years a
constantly mounting pres¬
sure, until he faces a choice
between lunacy and sui¬
cide. And those who live
around him breathe a sigh of relief.

Good people are afraid of hatred, and
even tend not to believe in it. If it ap¬
pears before their eyes, they generally
call it dedication or some such name.

And so we of the kibbutz thought
of him as a man who lived by his faith,

Novelist, memoirist, and peace advocate
Amos Oz died in December. This story first
appeared in Hebrew in 1965.

and who because of his faith dealt
severely with the world and with all of
us. He was not considered one of the
leaders of the kibbutz. His dedication
never earned him a position of author¬
ity or respect, in a committee or a
council, for example. And so it came
about that in the course of time we
invested him with a halo of self-
sufficient reticence.

This halo preserved him
from gossip. What can one
say, he is not like everyone
else, he says little and does
much. Admittedly, a soli¬
tary man. It can’t be helped.
But the kibbutz depends for
its existence on men like
him. And if he sometimes
says harsh things about us,
we are forced to admit to
ourselves that our everyday
lives do not always conform
to the ideals that we pro¬
fess, and consequently we
deserve his rebukes.

He works with machines.
At six o’clock every
morning he is awakened by
his alarm clock. He struggles
into his greasy overalls and
goes down to the dining hall. Here he
munches a thick slice of brown bread
smothered in jam and washes it down
with coffee. Then, from quarter past six
to nine o’clock, he dirties himself with
grease in a tin shed, which roasts like an
oven in the summer heat, while in win¬
ter the rain beats upon it a dull, mo¬
notonous tattoo. At nine he returns to
the hall and washes his rough hands

Photograph by Gerald Slota

STORY

with paraffin, with coarse soap and with
ordinary soap, to get rid of the black
grease. But the black never goes away, it
merely turns gray.

Over breakfast he casts his eye over
the outer edges of the morning paper,
looking for news on which hatred can
flourish: crime, corruption, degeneracy,
betrayal of the ideals for which the State
was founded.

After breakfast he returns to his shed.
This is his battlefield against cogwheels,
fan belts, carburetors and radiators,
spark plugs, and batteries. We see in him
a skilled craftsman and, in our usual
undemonstrative way, we admire his
workmanship. He wrestles with imple¬
ments and components as if they had a
will of their own—a treacherous, rebel¬
lious will that it is his task to subjugate
and set on the right path. Only on rare
occasions does he hurl some part away
and hiss: “It’s no good. Dead. We’ll have
to get a new one.” On such rare occa¬
sions he resembles a military com¬
mander who has suffered a setback that
he resolves to bear with dignity but with
clenched teeth.

In most cases, however, he manages
to mend, to repair, to set to rights. His
sunken eyes fasten on a rebellious oil
pump, and there is suppressed rage cou¬
pled with infinite patience in his look.
A schoolmasterly patience, we once re¬
marked to ourselves.

The two phrases most commonly
heard on his lips are “we’ll see” and “so
that’s it.” At times he grinds between his
teeth the word “really.”

H e is a heavily built man. So
heavily that it sometimes
seems as if the lines of his face
and body are sagging gradually down¬
ward, as though he suffers more than
most men from the law of gravity. The
furrows in his face are vertical, so are the
hopeless wrinkles round his mouth, his
broad shoulders are hunched, his hands
dangle when he walks, even his gray hair
always falls down over his forehead.

At half past twelve he leaves the
shed and walks up to the dining hall.
He always piles his plate high with
meat, potatoes, and an indiscrimi¬
nate assortment of vegetables. While
he vigorously masticates this meal
his eyes once more run over the
newspaper, finding change and decay
in all around.

At quarter past one he returns to the
shed and works until close on four
o’clock. These are the hardest hours.
In summer the shed roasts, and in
winter the wind’s icy claws penetrate
through the broken windows. He sighs
deeply, almost aloud, but staunchly
carries on with his work. He spreads a
black piece of sacking on the concrete
floor under the machine and prostrates
himself on it so to peer into the motor
from beneath. In twenty-seven years he
has never entered a single day’s illness in
the kibbutz work register.

When his working day is over, he
returns once more to the hall. He
gorges himself again, as he did first thing
in the morning, on brown bread and
jam. He washes it down with warm
milk. Then he goes to his room. Here
he showers, shaves, lies down on his
bachelor’s bed, and leafs through the
newspaper until he dozes off. He has still
not reached the middle pages.

The evening twilight wakes him
from his nap as if it had bitten him. At
this time he is always seized by a great
dread, despair, a premonition. As if this
twilight were final. Once and for all.
He hurriedly puts on his trousers,
makes himself a cup of coffee, and
settles himself in the armchair to tackle
the middle pages of the paper. As he
reads the leading article, the commen¬
tary and analysis columns, the per¬
sonal opinions, summaries of the
speeches by the leaders of the Move¬
ment and the Party, he experiences a
pain that is almost physical. His face
wears an expression of ascetic, morti¬
fied severity, far from all charity or
compassion. Damn them. What are
they doing to us. Why do they ruin
everything worthwhile. There is a grim
judicial look in his eye. His lips trem¬
ble. Occasionally there flashes in his
eyes a momentary sparkle of hatred,
the hatred that others interpret as
dedication. He follows the articles with
his pencil. Makes notes. Not in words
but with signs alone. Question mark.
Question mark, exclamation mark. Ver¬
tical stroke. Double exclamation marks.
And sometimes even a furious crossing
out in the body of the article.

The twilight fades and darkness
comes on. He must turn on the light.
The electric light tires his eyes and
dulls his alertness without which lucid
thought is impossible. He is terrified

of this yellow light, as if it were trying
to bribe him, to subvert his judgment.
Clear reasoning becomes cloudy, and
after half an hour or an hour appari¬
tions begin to arrive. He can no longer
pursue the claim of sharp, analytical
argument. He no longer has the pow¬
er to bring the current events of which
the paper speaks before the high tri¬
bunal of the teaching of the great vi¬
sionaries, the fathers of the Move¬
ment. And he is tired of judging. The
electric light hurts his eyes. He stares
vacantly. Apparitions come to him.
And with them comes pain. His face
loses its grim, judicial expression,
which can, albeit with great difficulty,
be described as attractive or even
spiritual, and without it he is sud¬
denly an ugly, an almost unbearably
ugly man. The kibbutz children call
him “wicked Haman” behind his back,
and point their fingers at him.

B ut the time between the onset of
twilight and the arrival of the
darkness is the best time of all.
He has this time, before he must turn
the electric light on and submit to tired¬
ness and haziness, to put things in their
proper order. He studies the newspaper
with pure, ice-cold hatred. He drafts the
charge sheet with penetrating acuteness,
section after section. How the State has
betrayed her visionaries’ vision, how she
played the whore and defiled herself. A
whole nation is giving itself up to de¬
bauchery and abandoning every vision.
The Jewish State was meant to begin a
new chapter in the history of the Jews,
and instead it is coming to look like a
kind of farewell party, an orgy to cele¬
brate the happy ending of the terrible
history of the Jews. But the terrible his¬
tory is still at its height. The knives are
even now being sharpened.

For generations upon generations
the Jews were a deep and serious people.
Now they have become a degenerate
Levantine rabble, rushing to gratify
themselves and satisfy their lusts with
every kind of novel excitement. Until
one day the enemy will come and gath¬
er in his spoil like driftwood, and we
shall wake up to find that all our hopes
have turned to dust. People do not per¬
ish through military defeat or economic
collapse. They do not understand this.
Even those who call themselves the
leaders, the heirs of the fathers of the

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

Movement, do not understand it. No,
peoples fall into decay, and only then
does the enemy come and enter the
gate; he conquers everything at the
height of the feast, when the defenders
are besotted and enfeebled. Disaster
will strike like lightning out of a clear
sky. At the height of the great banquet.
It is not war that will destroy the land,
but corruption. Already the stench lies
heavy on the air, night is falling, every¬
thing is becoming hazy in this yellow
electric light. Perhaps I ought to write
a letter to the editor. But who am I.

A good pair of spectacles might per¬
haps have relieved this suffering. But
this simple solution does not occur to
him. Wearily and painfully he squints
at the yellow light bulb and sees ap¬
paritions. He sees the crowds of volup¬
tuous painted women thronging the
city streets as though they were born
only to give and receive pleasure. He
sees the young men, dressed like Amer¬
icans in the pictures, wearing elegant
ties fastened with silver clips. They
wear dark glasses and a purposeful air.
He sees the boys and girls, grandchil¬
dren of the Maccabees, heirs of the
guardians and defenders and dreamers,
and here they are wrecking the public
telephones or singing dirty songs in the
streets at night. He sees the outra¬
geously low-cut dress of his younger
sister, Esther. He sees her shapely form
boarding the Italian airplane: parting
at the airport. They are only going
away for a few years, she and her hus¬
band, Gideon, until he is promoted to
a respectable office job that will allow
him to live permanently in his own
town instead of roaming around for¬
eign capitals like an errand boy. Then
the feel of his sister’s body in their
parting embrace. He sees the plane: the
hubbub of people arriving, leaving,
seeing off, meeting, the stewards loving
everyone indiscriminately, and me in
the middle of this airport carnival like
an evil spirit: why are they all leaving,
why all this commotion, what’s the
matter, surely at times like this we
should all be overcome with wonder¬
ment. Then the sound of the tires on
the gray asphalt, like lecherous whis¬
pers in the middle of the night: two
o’clock in the morning, in a stream of
quiet, powerful, brightly colored cars in
which new, free Jews sit two by two,
male and female. Where are they go¬

ing, all these crowds of people, at two
o’clock in the morning. Who will get
up for work tomorrow. And who needs
these new buildings, concrete and glass,
curved shapes like a woman’s hips. All
the contagious effluvia of America in
this land of dreams. Even the Hebrew
policeman in the night smiles a kind of
stylized, courteous smile at me as if he
too shares in the universal friendliness.
And the universal sobriety. The whis¬
pering seduction. The cold humor,
which is lechery, which is seething
debauchery, which is abomination it¬
self. We tried to realize a dream, and it
has all turned into Hollywood. The
Land of Israel is a whore. The man who
hates his country is called a traitor, but
the man who hates the treacherous
whore is truly loyal to the dream that
has been betrayed. If the pain in your
eyes is driving you to distraction, you
can always go out into the darkness
and take a little walk outside the kib¬
butz, then make a good supper of a
huge salad with cream and salt fish,
three slices of bread and cream
cheese, and two glasses of tea. Should
you find yourself next to someone
suitable, you can sit and chat. Not
about party strategy, calculations of
political profit and loss, but about
setting the world to rights.

A fter supper he does not leave
the hall, but takes a seat at the
table where the evening news¬
paper is being read. This is the copy
that the treasurer has brought back
with him from town. It is surrounded
by a ring of veteran comrades. Those
who are standing read standing, over
the heads of those who are seated. And
some of those who are seated read up¬
side down. Gradually a discussion be¬
gins, an argument develops.

It begins with explanations, interpre¬
tations, comparisons between what is
happening now and what happened in
the old days. Then the heat rises, be¬
cause the discussion turns to what
ought to happen, and what we should
be doing. There are moderates and
there are extremists, and there are
those who always seek the golden mean
between the two.

Most of them are unable to see
where things are leading. Or perhaps
they consciously deceive themselves.
He is obliged to open their eyes,

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STORY

because these are the last of the faith¬
ful. He sets to work explaining to them
how the rot has attacked the roots.
How this crazy country is gorging itself
on its own flesh unawares. Admit¬
tedly, the structure is still growing and
spreading. Apparently, settlements are
being added, new roads are being built.
But any biologist will testify that even
a corpse will go on growing hair and
nails until it is decomposed. The
whole structure is already doomed to
destruction, from corruption and into
corruption. The cancer will feed on
the whore until she dies. Drunken
shouts, parochial boasts, empty words
cannot conceal the treachery. The
people have betrayed their leaders,
the leaders have betrayed the people,
and both alike have betrayed the vi¬
sion. The kibbutz might have been
the last bastion of the Third Com¬
monwealth, but even it has been be¬
trayed, its leaders and people have
gone together to the whore.

All his listeners discern a great deal
of exaggeration in this, but the older
veterans know that it contains an ele¬
ment of holy anger, and perhaps even
truth, and it is as well for some of the
younger men to take these words at their
face value and perhaps receive a jolt.

But the younger men, three or four in
number, merely grin. They find it strange
that a man can be a brilliant mechanic
and at the same time such an utter fool.

S ince the disputants are working¬
men, not layabouts, they gener¬
ally stop toward ten o’clock and
say: “We’ll talk about this some other
time. We’ll argue it all out then.”

Then they all go to their rooms, and
only the night watchmen are left
awake, and even they do not go out
and lurk in the dark along the perim¬
eter fence but linger in the dining hall,
taking tiny sips of their tea to kill time
and flirting with the night nurses, who
ought to be at the nursery, not here.
Nothing is as it should be.

He goes back to his room. He cross¬
es the lawn and finds a sprinkler left
on and a leaking hose. He must con¬
quer his hatred. Reaching his room, he
turns on the light. Again it hurts his
eyes. Despite the tiredness he takes an
old tome down from the rough wood¬
en bookcase and settles himself to read
the words of the founders. Others still

sustain themselves on what they have
read in their youth and do not realize
that forgetfulness is gradually eating
away at their faith.

W hereas he persistently re¬
turns every evening to what
he was taught many years
ago in the Zionist Youth Movement in
Lithuania. He devotes himself, heart and
soul, to the cruel beauty of the words of
the vision. True, most of the fathers
of the Movement did not write in pol¬
ished Hebrew, but their thinking was
polished, and nothing of their analyti¬
cal vigor has been lost. And there are
some pages that only now, in these
unsavory times, suddenly take on the
full depth of their meaning.

After a few pages, tiredness gets the
better of him: he is no longer young,
he spends long hours each day in ardu¬
ous physical work, and every evening
he wrestles with all his might with
theories and ideas. Obviously he would
have liked to go on reading with all his
might and main, only his body is tired.

During the night the thick smell
always begins to fill the room. Even in
summer, when all the windows are wide
open, there is no refuge from it. The
sounds of the night come in and swoop
at him as soon as he turns out the light
and tries to go to sleep. Even a man
with a clear view of the word is helpless
in the face of these wild sounds.

He tries to hear in the sounds an
echo of his thoughts, either by a play
on the words “wind” and “spirit” or by
translating the howling of the jackals
into the wailing of foxes, which is a
common image for national calamity,
and also for lunacy and death. But the
night sounds here in our kibbutz be¬
tween the mountains and the winding
valleys are stronger than any image;
they sweep everything away, they
swoop down on you in the night, and
words are lost.

H e was a solitary man who
hoarded gloom. The hater and
his hatred fed on each other.
So it has ever been. Many years ago he
had a wife: a refugee, odd, very thin,
acid, a survivor of one of the ghetto ris¬
ings. She had come here to tell him how
both his brothers had died heroically,
firing at the Germans until their am¬
munition ran out. She went on talking.

When she stopped, night had fallen. So
she stayed the night. And the next
night. She was several years older
than he.

After their marriage, she tried to
make him leave the kibbutz. Her plan
was to live on help from her relations,
on German reparation money, to set
herself up properly and live well. The
kibbutz was a good enough place, but
not for her. She had suffered enough
for the Jewish people: let others suffer
now for a change; she wanted to live
a little, at long last.

She was thin and acid. Her body
satisfied and yet did not satisfy his
hunger. After a few months they
parted. She went her way, he re¬
mained. Her relations gave her a lit¬
tle, the reparation money made up
the rest, and she opened a fashion sa¬
lon that was every bit as good as the
salon she had had in Warsaw before.

Since she had not remarried, he
continued to visit her on his rare trips
to town. He went to beg for her body.
Sometimes she granted it, with a sigh,
telling him to be quick and not mess
about, chiding herself for her good
nature, which was always landing her
in trouble. He would start arguing
with her about the point of it all. He
hated her, of course, with all his
heart. But this was a daytime hatred,
which was entirely different from the
nocturnal hatred to which the night
sounds outside responded.

T he night is alive. His sunken,
severe eyes see shapes in the
dark. The room is not clean.
Dust here and there. Under the bed a
forgotten pair of socks. The sound of
the crickets comes in waves. Distant
lowing of cattle. A shriek. A tractor
growling in a far-off field. Dogs barking
as though demented. Laughter of cou¬
ples crossing the lawn, sinking into the
darkness of the wadi. Damn them. And
jackals in the vineyard. A hot wind
blows from the desert and ruffles the
trees, warning them of the fire and
the axe for which they are growing:
there is nothing new in the world.

He tries turning on the radio to si¬
lence these tormenting sounds. What
is there on the radio? A sensual tune,
a lascivious song, a sickeningly warm,
moist voice. He switches it off and
curses the singer, and meanwhile all

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

the night sounds return. Sleep hits
him suddenly, like a coup de grace.

In his sleep, voluptuous women,
with hips and laughter and hair.

Then a scream may sound in the
night. The watchmen say: “Poor devil.
What can be done.”

A few days before New Year, he
went to Tel Aviv in connec¬
tion with his work, to inspect
and possibly order a new kind of
American piston.

As usual, he went to see his ex-wife.
She made him coffee. They argued a
little about the news and the point of
it all. He asked for her body. She re¬
fused, and he begged a little. In vain:
it transpired that she was about to
remarry. No, not for love. What a
crazy idea: Who would marry for love,
at her age and with her experience?
No. Her man was also from Warsaw,
he had also lost his former family, he
too had been miraculously saved, and
he too dealt in ladies’ clothes. To¬
gether they could go far.

He left his ex-wife without saying
goodbye.

He stepped hesitantly out into the
city. Gradually his stride became more
confident and even furious. He went to
his sister’s flat, forgetting that she and
her husband were in Europe, and would
remain there for another year or two at
least, until Gideon got his promotion.

The tenants received him politely.
They thought he had come to check up
on the state of the furniture. They prom¬
ised they were taking good care of the
flat. They invited him in, to have a drink
and to ascertain with his own eyes that
everything was in good order. But he
stood in the doorway, cursed them, and
left. He walked the streets of Tel Aviv
until nightfall, and saw that everything
was lost. At dusk the fluorescent street¬
lights came on and hurt his eyes. He
turned onto the dark side streets. To¬
ward midnight he came on the agricul¬
tural machinery showrooms where he
had intended to inspect and possibly
order the new piston he had read about
in the prospectus. The street was in
darkness, and the showroom was closed
and deserted. A wave of hatred rose in
his chest until he could hear his own
breathing. The bastards had shut up

shop and gone off to chase women. How
wonderful were the early fathers of the
Labor Movement, who foresaw it all and
even warned us in advance. We made
light of their writings. Even a corpse
goes on growing hair and nails until it
finally rots.

At the end of the same street he
picked up a whore, followed her to a
cheap hotel, and gave her the money
he had intended to spend in the show¬
room. He stayed with her till morning
and hated her and himself profoundly.
Next day he returned to the kibbutz
and worked on his machines; he read
the special New Year number of the
newspaper from cover to cover and
waited for darkness to fall. When it was
dark he went out to the orchard and
hanged himself from a tree. We found
him after the festival, and praised his
devotion to his work, and his dedica¬
tion to the ideals to which we hold fast.

The burial of a man who has de¬
voted himself to setting the world to
rights is no different from that of any
other man, and we have nothing more
to add. He was a solitary man. May he
rest in peace. ■

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REVIEWS

NEW BOOKS

By Lidija Haas

I n “Shrink,” a short piece from her
1993 book Have a Nice Day: From
the Balkan War to the American
Dream, the Croatian writer Dubravka
Ugresic recounts, or imagines, trying to
explain her problems to a New York
psychotherapist. They don’t get far, be¬
cause the Ugresic character keeps get¬
ting tangled up in the history of the
former Yugoslavia, which she has just
left, and in the bloody wars still raging
there, while the cartoonish shrink is
keen to skip this “horror film” stuff and
“get to the fundamental source of your
frustration as quickly as possible.” When
I first read this story, at age ten, it sound¬
ed like a joke about America, or about
therapy. Now it seems to be more about
history, and how (or if) you can live with
it. “I walk down Fifth Avenue and sud¬
denly see the buildings falling like card
houses,” the patient reports.

Everything is mixed up in my head, ev¬
erything exists simultaneously, noth¬
ing has just one meaning any more,

nothing is firm any longer, not the
earth, not frontiers, not people, not
houses ... Everything is so fragile it
seems it will shatter any minute.

That’s an experience that would be
all too familiar to Andreas Ban, narrator
of EEG (New Directions, $18.95), the last
novel by the Croatian writer Dasa Drn-
dic, who died last year. Although here
Ban himself is the shrink, or, as he’s
described in Drndics earlier
novel Belladonna, which
cast him as its third-person
protagonist, “a psychologist
who does not psychologize
any more. A writer who no
longer writes.” (Celia
Hawkesworth translated
both books, as well as the
Ugresic.) EEG begins just
after Ban has attempted
suicide and survived—that is, failed. As
its title may suggest, the novel is struc¬
tured somewhat like a scan of his brain

activity, which is to say that it’s associa¬
tive, looping, digressive: thrilling and
deliberately infuriating in equal mea¬
sure. By the same token, it’s also, like
several of Drndic’s other books, an ex¬
periment in how much of the horrific
twentieth century one work of fiction
can swallow without breaking apart.

Here, as with the famous list of names
in Drndic’s best-known novel, Trieste —
some forty-four pages, each four columns
wide, of Jews killed or deported in Italian
territory between 1943 and 1945—are
more Homeric catalogues of the slain:
there are Soviet records in Russian (not
even transliterated) that compile dates,
secret-police charges, place and method
of death; a thorough accounting of the
fates of European chess players that
traces a good deal of Nazi and NKVD
activity along the way; and a twenty-
page, small-print table logging books
looted from the homes of Croatian Jews
in Zagreb, in 1941. The Trieste list is
headed “Behind Every Name There Is a
Story.” EEG, too, is centrally concerned
with the question of what needs to be
recorded—and what doesn’t. We learn
of Ban’s on-and-off relationship with a
woman named Leila—“just an ordinary
love affair, with quite a lot of wine and
sex”—and then hear little about her
until we skip to the point decades later
when she

had reappeared old and fat and con¬
stantly drunk, and I had had my
own tribulations, my own deaths,
my own solitudes, my own wanderings
through the world, my own illnesses.

(What’s really of interest about Leila,
it turns out, is her father’s service in
the Wehrmacht.) And Ban isn’t
above withholding a
backstory as punishment.
Of his father’s widow, his
stepmother, he says: “I
won’t go all the way back
to her childhood to find
when or why that woman
developed her obsessive
need to control. Fuck that
woman’s childhood.”

You might plausibly de¬
tect just a hint of glee in Drndic’s
determination to keep the reader
trapped inside the mind of this cranky

Above: “The Future Volcano,” by Borna Bursae © The artist. Below: Photograph by Tara Sellios
from the Lessons of Impermanence series © The artist. Courtesy Gallery Kayafas, Boston

REVIEWS 75

old man who is overwhelmed by every
affront—down to the aggressive ba¬
nality of advertising and the cafe-goers
shrieking into their cell phones. Ban
is someone for whom each forest hides
a mass grave and even the shortest city
stroll is riddled with plaques com¬
memorating unimaginable crimes (or
else, much worse, the hypocrisy and
denial signaled by the absence of such
memorials). Even a writer’s retreat in
Tuscany is the occasion for an excur¬
sus on the wartime conduct of the
Italian aristocracy (it’s at least as bad
as you’d think). Yet the force of Ban’s
anger and the leaping, unexpected
connections he draws are exhilarat¬
ing, restoring the reality of all those
cutoff lives, along with the reader’s
capacity to take in the scale of com¬
plicity involved—from the CIA’s har¬
boring of Nazi war criminals to the
tawdry record of Croat nationalism—
and to register history’s shocks anew.

Ban occasionally breaks the
fourth wall to address the possible
objections of Drndic’s readers, mock¬
ing their attachment to harmonious
narrative structure or the kind of
characters that count as fully real¬
ized: “Who is ever and anywhere
rounded, and is it necessary to be
‘complete’ and rounded in order to
exist—to live—in a complete and
rounded way? Unbelievable idiocies.”
These formal questions seem con¬
nected to moral ones. You can’t
help but notice that many of the
frills of the pre-modernist, bourgeois
novel—the food and furnishings and
clothing that mark out who is real
and to be cared about—are precisely
those trappings of civilization that
were routinely looted in the past cen¬
tury, the “works of fine art and jew¬
elry,” even the

pillows, frying pans, saucepans and
teapots, children’s toys, from dolls
and bowls to little cars and electric
model railways, the theft in fact of ev¬
erything that makes a life, the theft of
the life of those whose physical life
was also taken from them.

EEG is a monument against the
common notion that political con¬
victions soften with age, as you
learn to let the world off the hook.
Neither Drndid nor her books did
any such thing.

R emembrance is likewise crucial
to the Mexican writer Julian
Herbert’s project in THE
HOUSE OF THE PAIN OF OTHERS:
CHRONICLE OF A SMALL GENO¬
CIDE (Graywolf, $16, translated by
Christina MacSweeney), although
where Drndic is commanding, Herbert
mostly opts to cajole. His book, which
also offers lists of names and carefully
reconstructed atrocities, centers on the
killings of some three hundred Chinese
residents of Torreon over a few days in
May 1911, while the city was being
taken by revolutionary forces. Like some
of Drndic’s preoccupations, this massa¬
cre is in a more or less continuous state
of being forgotten. Even when it is al¬
lowed into the official Mexican narra¬
tive, it’s most often blamed on rampag¬
ing revolutionary outsiders—the favorite
is Pancho Villa, though in fact he was
hundreds of miles away, taking Ciudad
Juarez—or explained as an unfortunate,
spontaneous outpouring of xenophobic
rage by local people living in poverty.
Herbert has a more complex and more
damning story to tell, one that impli¬
cates a far greater swath of Mexican
society—not to mention the national
authorities, who studiously minimized it
afterward. He takes on, as Drndic did,
the dishonesties and self-deceptions that
can keep the politics of an entire coun¬
try rotten all the way down.

The book is both vivid and enthusi¬
astically researched, examining each
piece of available evidence to establish
what must have happened at every stage
and how it was obscured, then and later.
Herbert re-creates the history of Torreon
and its Chinese community, how they
thrived and who saw them as an eco¬
nomic threat. (He favors all kinds of
local color; the book’s title, rather bril¬
liantly, is the nickname of the soccer
team’s home stadium.) Here and there,
he’ll allow his research to slip into em-
pathic identifications, imagining, for
instance, a Mexican mother of half-
Chinese kids having to watch

a bunch of killers take their hatred of
you out on your children, never giv¬
ing you the chance to shoulder the
burden of the hate the world metes
out on [them] because their skin is a
different color.

Or he’ll offer a passing flash of
self-revelation, just enough to place

himself within the society he’s de¬
scribing, as when he notices on some¬
one’s face “the dull molten-glass light
common among meth smokers,”
which “I’ve seen on many other faces,
and also in my own mirror.” He
quotes, too, a “dizzyingly Balzacian
paragraph” in an earlier account that
lists the items plundered from the vic¬
tims in the days when they became a
target—again, a life’s worth: the
books and clothing and writing
desks and leather notebooks and sil¬
ver inkstands, the paintings and
bedclothes and underwear. Herbert
simply adds: “It was not yet nine in
the morning.”

The House of the Pain of Others
began as a short essay and ballooned
from there, until at one point Her¬
bert, a poet, musician, and writer of
fiction (including the autobiographi¬
cal Tomb Song) noticed that “the
impulse toward the great Mexican
novel had taken hold of me like a
fever.” What he decided on in the
end is a so-called gonzo cronica, “a
stylized cross section of history that
would bring together the events of
the past, and the dents they have
left in the present (and in me).” It’s
also a “denunciation” in disguise,
“an oblique reflection on violence in
Mexico,” published in the wake of
the infamous disappearance of forty-
three teaching students from Ayo-
tzinapa in Guerrero. When Herbert
asks a Torreon cabdriver just who
killed the Chinese there, the man
collapses the intervening century by
suggesting it must have been the
Zetas, one of the most notorious
drug cartels: “They’re the jerks that
kill everyone.” This may say as
much about everyday life in Mexico
as it does about the general igno¬
rance of the Torreon massacre,
bringing to mind the grim series of
false alarms that followed the disap¬
pearance of the forty-three, in which
bodies kept turning up, but not the
ones they were searching for. As in
Drndic’s Europe, it seems the graves
are everywhere.

F or the Irish novelist Sally
Rooney, a Marxist not yet thir¬
ty who was last year anointed
the voice of her generation in the Brit¬
ish press, any anxieties on the question

76 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

of narrative form have so far been kept
admirably in check. Both the word-of-
mouth hit Conversations with Friends
and her second book, NORMAL PEO-
PLE (Hogarth, $26), are realist novels
of just the nineteenth-century kind
whose bounds, Andreas Ban implies,
have been breached by the events of
the twentieth and beyond. They’re
marvels of restraint, combining deft
social observation—especially of shifts
of power between individuals and
groups—with acute feeling. Rooney is
precise and leaves a lot unsaid, though
the directness of her descriptions tends
to belie this—she’s a master of the
kind of millennial deadpan that ap¬
pears to skewer a whole life and per¬
sonality in a sentence or two, leaving
the knots of anguish and confusion
beneath. Take Frances, the college-
student narrator of Conversations with
Friends, on entering the house of an
older and slightly famous married
couple, Melissa and Nick, for the first
time, dazzled and disdainful at once:
“I remember seeing a dark wooden
bowl filled with bright fruit, and notic¬
ing the glass conservatory. Rich peo¬
ple, I thought. I was always thinking
about rich people then.”

One of the more striking elements of
Rooney’s debut was her ability to show
how people’s politics do and don’t inflect
their everyday lives—the tensions they
create, how they inform
jokes and arguments. The
protagonists of Normal
People, Marianne and
Connell, are schoolmates
in rural Ireland—she, the
isolated, often miserable
daughter of a well-off fam¬
ily; he, the brilliant, ath¬
letic son of a single mother,

Lorraine, who cleans Mar¬
ianne’s house. The novel
maps their relationship in
intense bursts punctuated
by carefully dated gaps,
usually of several months
at a time (though there’s
one of only a few min¬
utes). This narrowness of
focus—more extreme than
that of Conversations with
Friends, though this book
replaces its first-person
narrator with a close third
following Connell and

Marianne in turn—brings the snip¬
pets we see of the social environment
into sharper relief. At one point, Con¬
nell wins a major scholarship and can
suddenly afford a continental vaca¬
tion, full of those gorgeous trappings
of the realist novel:

It’s like something he assumed was just
a painted backdrop all his life has re¬
vealed itself to be real: foreign cities are
real, and famous artworks, and under¬
ground railway systems, and remnants
of the Berlin Wall. That’s money, the
substance that makes the world real.
There’s something so corrupt and sexy
about it.

(One other thing Rooney makes
both real and sexy, incidentally, is
sex—a feat more remarkable in the
context of contemporary fiction than
it should be.)

Rooney’s protagonists are usually as
funny and intellectually agile as she is.
They’re also young enough to be deeply
concerned, as an Andreas Ban is not,
with how to fit themselves into the re¬
quired shape, and with how much to
blame themselves when they can’t man¬
age to do so. Frances notes near the
beginning of Conversations with Friends
that she “certainly never fantasized
about a radiant future where I was paid
to perform an economic role,” a quality
she at times interprets as “a failure to

take an interest in my own life, which
depressed me,” while simultaneously
feeling that “my disinterest in wealth
was ideologically healthy.” Normal Peo¬
ple, as its title makes clear, puts the issue
of fitting in at its heart, a reminder of
how fundamental a problem of the hu¬
man condition it is, and how many
ethical risks it involves. Nearly everyone
in the novel suffers and makes others
suffer for conformity, and for at least one
character it turns out to be lethal. At
school—a place Marianne experiences
as inherently Kafkaesque—Connell
humiliates her, refusing to acknowledge
her in public. After going to such lengths
to maintain his position there, he finds
himself, at Trinity College, Dublin, sur¬
rounded by the type of person who “just
goes around comparing how much
money their parents make. Like I’m be¬
ing literal with that, I’ve seen that hap¬
pen.” Marianne attends Trinity, too, and
dates Jamie, whose “dad was one of the
people who had caused the financial
crisis—not figuratively, one of the ac¬
tual people involved.”

Toward the end of the book, two
characters are imagined as “like two
little plants sharing the same plot of
soil, growing around one another, con¬
torting to make room, taking certain
unlikely positions.” It could be a roman¬
tic image—both of Rooney’s novels are
at least in one sense love stories—but
it’s also sad, if not sinister,
a representation of the
hopeless distortion and
confinement involved in
living with others. Rooney
is on record about her am¬
bivalence as to the value of
what she does, “writing
entertainment, making
decorative aesthetic ob¬
jects at a time of historical
crisis.” And maybe there is
some murmur of cognitive
dissonance in being so
thoroughly diverted by
what’s evidently the work
of someone with a com¬
prehensive and impas¬
sioned critique of the
world as it is. That begs
the question: Does it un¬
dermine what a novel has
to say about its times if it’s
making them more bear¬
able to live in? ■

REVIEWS

SHALLOW GALLS
TO SHALLOW

On Thomas Merton, fifty years after his death
By Garry Wills

Discussed in this essay:

On Thomas Merton, by Mary Gordon. Shambhala. 160 pages. $22.95.

T he Seven Storey Mountain,
Thomas Merton’s account of
his conversion to Catholi¬
cism in 1938 and his subsequent en¬
try into a Trappist monastery in
Kentucky called Gethsemani, sold
six hundred thousand copies when it
was first published, in 1948, prompted
a surprising number of men to be¬
come (or want to become) Trappist
monks, and has since been translated
into over twenty languages. The
novelist Mary Gordon, in her new
study of Merton, suggests it was not a
book but a phenomenon. It may
have been a phenomenon, but it was
not atypical. It was in fact one of
many signs of a feverish religiosity
following World War II—a time of
religious conversions, bulging semi¬
naries, national revivals, and inter-
faith goodwill increasing among
what Will Herberg called “the three
great faiths” in his book Protestant,
Catholic, Jew (1955).

Polls in 1947 indicated that the
most-respected leaders in America
were ministers, priests, and rabbis. In
1954, “under God” was added to the
Pledge of Allegiance, and in 1956 “In
God We Trust” became the national
motto. Billy Graham became “pastor
to the presidents,” and Monsignor
Fulton Sheen became a television
star. Religious conversions—whether
to Protestantism (channeled by Gra¬
ham) or to Catholicism (channeled
by Sheen)—were everywhere. Even
Dwight Eisenhower heard the call
and was baptized by a Presbyterian
minister in 1953, his first year as
president. That same year, the Presi-

Garry Wills is a professor emeritus of history
at Northwestern University. His most recent
book is What the Qur’an Meant.

dential Prayer Breakfast (later the
National Prayer Breakfast) was insti¬
tuted. Around this time, the term
Judeo-Christian became a common
description of America’s traditions.

In this period of heated piety,
Catholics seemed the most success¬
fully devout. Norman Podhoretz,
with his interest in who was “mak¬
ing it,” said that Catholics were
having their moment, and Lenny
Bruce called Catholicism “the only
the church.” In what was called
“the Catholic Renaissance,” many
Catholic intellectuals turned from
modern commercialism toward
eternity, or to the thirteenth cen¬
tury as a plausible substitute for
eternity. They took up Gregorian
chant, St. Thomas Aquinas, and
the work of French Catholic liter¬
ary stars—Charles Peguy, Paul
Claudel, Frangois Mauriac, Pierre
Teilhard du Chardin, Henri de Lu-
bac, Georges Bernanos, Henri
Gheon, Jacques Maritain, Etienne
Gilson, Simone Weil. Many of
these authors were translated into
English for the publishing house of
the Catholic Renaissance, Sheed
and Ward.

Merton made Gethsemani a fa¬
mous monastery by joining it, but
another abbey, St. John’s in Minne¬
sota, was even more influential and
had an earlier influx of vocations. In
1943, five years before The Seven Sto¬
rey Mountain was published, Eugene
McCarthy, the later senator and
presidential candidate, entered
St. John’s Abbey to become a monk.
To do this, he broke off his courting
of the equally pious Abigail Quigly,
who prayed that he would leave the
abbey and come back to her. When

he did, they married and set up a
farm as a kind of lay monastery of
their own, called St. Anne’s Farm
(after the Virgin’s mother). The nov¬
elist J. F. Powers was part of the
St. John’s Abbey orbit and a close
friend of the McCarthys. They called
themselves Detachers, for their de¬
tachment from the world.

St. John’s Abbey, under the fa¬
mous liturgical reformer Dom Virgil
Michel, was in close communica¬
tion with Dorothy Day’s Catholic
Worker community as well as
Friendship House, an interracial
apostolate in Toronto founded by
the White Russian turned mendi¬
cant, Baroness de Hueck. The poet
Robert Lowell and his wife Jean
Stafford were followers of both
women, and worked for Sheed and
Ward. Lowell and J. F. Powers, in¬
spired by Dorothy Day’s pacifism,
went to prison as conscientious ob¬
jectors during World War II (they
would later trade prison memories
when they met at Yaddo). Day and
de Hueck were inspirations, also, for
Merton on his way to Gethsemani.

Mary Gordon says that she was
too young to be impressed by The
Seven Storey Mountain when it came
out; but her father, she would find
out later, was part of the Catholic
Renaissance. It was because of him
that she looked back and studied
the period, and his influence can be
felt not just in this book, but in
much of her work. The child of an
Irish-Catholic mother and a father
who had converted to an ardent
conservative Catholicism, Gordon
was raised in a household as much
caught up in that high tide of religi¬
osity as Merton was when he wrote
The Seven Storey Mountain. Gordon,
the author of more than a dozen nov¬
els, short-story collections, volumes of
essays, and memoirs, has since written
about the church—especially in early
works, such as the novel Final Pay -
ments (1978)—often struggling to rec¬
oncile feminist beliefs with the persis¬
tent longing for those early days of
orthodoxy. In her novels, Wilfrid
Sheed wrote, “the Church is seen not
as a good place or a bad place ... but
as a multilayered poem or vision
which dominates your life equally
whether you believe it or not.”

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

Mary Gordon’s father, David, con¬
verted to Catholicism in 1937, the year
before Merton. He loved the Latin
Mass (he had her memorize all of it
before she was seven), revered
St. Thomas More (patron of Catholic
Renaissance laymen such as Mario
Cuomo), admired Gregorian chant,
and planned to publish a book on the

ton), both remembered time in England
and France. Both were writers—David
published articles in Catholic maga¬
zines and took money from his wife to
launch a Catholic journal. This link
through her father gives Gordon “the
eerie feeling of connectedness be¬
tween my life and Merton’s.” She con¬
tinued to feel that way even though

(he had an earlier one). He said he
went to Europe, though he never had
a passport (he was born in Europe,
though, as a Jewish child from Lithu¬
ania named Israel). He claimed he
attended Harvard (he never graduated
from high school). He suggested he
wrote high literary criticism (he ran a
porn magazine called Hot Dog).

right-wing Catholic poet Paul Claudel.
After her father’s death, Gordon found
his copy of Merton’s poems with a
translation from the French stapled to
the back cover. She took this to be her
father’s own translation.

Her father seemed to resemble Mer¬
ton in many ways—both were adult
converts to Catholicism, both gradu¬
ated from an Ivy League school (Har¬
vard for Gordon, Columbia for Mer-

the link frayed a little more each time
she looked at it. To write The Shadow
Man (1997), her still-adoring book
about her father, who died in 1952
when she was only seven years old,
she discovered that he had encased
her childhood in a lovingly intricate
shell of lies.

He told her that he was an only
child, like her (he had a sister). She
thought her mother was his only wife

He was indeed part of the Catholic
Renaissance, but part of its dark side. He
was a church triumphalist who thought,
with Father Leonard Feeney, that all
non-Catholics go to hell. He admired
Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and
Joe McCarthy. It might have softened
his daughter’s pain on confronting these
discoveries if she had noted that many
other Catholics shared one or more of
these failings in the 1940s and 1950s. It

Photograph from Father Louie: Photographs of Thomas Merton, by Ralph Eugene Meatyard © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts

REVIEWS

was not all just Gregorian chant and
Thomas Aquinas in the church of Pius
XII that David Gordon and Thomas
Merton joined.

Her devotion to him, nevertheless,
remained unshaken. In fact, she was
made acutely uncomfortable that he
was not buried in congenial com'
pany, but with people who had not
appreciated him. So she went
through the complicated process of
exhuming his body and having it re¬
buried in consecrated Catholic
ground, with a ceremony in
proper ecclesiastical Latin. More
to the point, she continued to
see a link between her father
and Merton. Only this can ex¬
plain the unusual shape of her
new book, which examines Mer¬
ton’s seemingly contradictory
identities as a writer and a
monk through four chapters.

The nature of Gordon’s affec¬
tion for Merton is common among
his devotees, who see something
sympathetic in his struggle to find
God, and admire the way he went
on to combine the spiritual asceti¬
cism of monastic life with a more
temporal, progressive concern for
the moral dilemmas of the world.
Gordon is deeply invested in her
imagined tie to Merton, living with him
so intently that she says when she saw,
getting out of the bathtub, a picture of
him on one of his books, she “quickly
covered [herself] with a towel.” And
when she reads a late passage in the
journals, she bursts out, “‘Oh, Tom,
don’t you know you have only days to
live?’ I want to reach into the pages and
pull him back into life.”

In her book, she leaves aside Mer¬
ton’s poems (not very good, she
thinks) and his study of Eastern reli¬
gions, which broke him out of the tri¬
umphal church of The Seven Storey
Mountain. She concentrates instead
on what she considers Merton’s three
most important writings—the pivotal
Seven Storey Mountain, of course (de¬
spite its triumphalism), the seven vol¬
umes of his journals, and his posthu¬
mously published novel My Argument
with the Gestapo, one of five he had
written before becoming a monk, and
the only one he did not destroy. He
preserved it, and was preparing it for
publication when he died.

Though this early autobiographical
novel is not much more than third-rate
Joyce, fourth-rate Eliot, and some out-of-
date Surrealism, Gordon is drawn to the
way in which the thinly disguised Mer¬
ton as protagonist lived the very things
David Gordon claimed to have lived—
college, England, France. The same se¬
quence is repeated by Merton in The
Seven Storey Mountain without the
disguise of fiction. But that tale of a
worldly young Merton finding God
mutes a key event, the reason for his

departure from Cambridge University
before he finished his course of studies.
Merton’s father died just before Merton
entered Cambridge, and the guardian
who supplied his funds yanked him
home when it became known that he
had impregnated a local Cambridge girl.
Gordon regrets that Merton showed no
later interest in the girl and his baby
(though the reason for that may lie in
his novel’s possible slight reference to the
event, of which Gordon does not take
note: “I several times went out with a girl
who was known all over Cambridge as
the ‘Freshman’s delight’ ”).

An early fan and promoter of The
Seven Storey Mountain was Evelyn
Waugh. Waugh’s favor made his British
publisher ask Waugh to be an addi¬
tional cutter and corrector of the book
(Robert Giroux had edited the Ameri¬
can edition thoroughly), which Waugh
retitled Elected Silence for the English
market. The best-known aspect of
Gethsemani was the fact that Cister¬
cians of the Strict Observance (as the
Trappists are formally named) maintain

a prayerful silence with one another.
Waugh, who admired this dedication to
silence, was critical later on when he saw
how publicly voluble Merton became
with his flood of books. In his twenty-
seven years at Gethsemani, he often
published two or three books a year,
while also writing articles, public state¬
ments, an expansive journal, ancillary
diaries, and fifteen thousand letters
(many to celebrities). In The Seven Storey
Mountain, Merton said that his writ¬
ing was just doing the Lord’s work, like
that of his brother monks milk¬
ing cows or making cheese.
When Waugh said that contem¬
plative orders should stick to
making cheese and liqueurs, Mer¬
ton responded by telling Waugh
to say the rosary every day (espe¬
cially if he did not like doing it).
Their warm mutual admiration
coolly evanesced.

fter Merton published
The Seven Storey Moun¬
tain, and people started
showing up at his abbey as postu¬
lants to become monks or as
“seculars” making weekend re¬
treats, Merton’s books began to
earn real money for Gethsemani,
funds needed to handle the flood
of applicants and visitors he had in¬
spired. His output now had to match
this influx. His otherworldly superiors,
meanwhile, suddenly had a crass stake
in his popularity—it brought the ab¬
bey fame, recruits, and money. In time
he would begin to resent this, saying
the publicity made him feel “cheap”:
“I am sickened ... by being treated as
an article for sale, as a commodity.”

He became depressed and sour
about what was happening to the
abbey. It was staging itself, in a kind
of “liturgical vaudeville,” which
heightened the flow of people he was
bringing in—“all those guys, some
solid, mostly half-wits I think, who
are nevertheless good, well-meaning
people and honest in their way, and
many of whom are here on account
of me.”

The abbey tried to make Merton
more than an ornament of its es¬
tablishment, giving him responsible
roles such as the novice master. But
he preferred to devote himself to
his writing, and he let his fellow

Photograph by Thomas Merton. Courtesy Merton Legacy Trust and the
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019 Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University, Louisville, Kentucky

monks know in an open letter that
he would not serve as the abbot,
should that office come open, not
wanting to spend the rest of his life
“arguing about trifles with 125 con¬
fused and anxiety-ridden monks.”
The brothers could not publicly ex¬
press discontent with that insult. He
was their source of the world’s respect.

As he distanced himself from the
monks, he was amassing an adoring
fan club, corresponding feverishly
with peace and civil-rights activists
who looked to him for moral confir¬
mation of their cause. Other nota¬
bles in the Catholic Renaissance
were bouncing back from the Middle
Ages, giving up detachment for en¬
gagement, moving from Pius XII to
John XXIII and the Second Vatican
Council. Eugene and Abigail
McCarthy left St. Anne’s Farm and
opposed the Vietnam War. Robert
Lowell gave up work for Sheed and
Ward and would in time organize re¬
sistance to Lyndon Johnson. Jerry
Brown left the seminary and became
the governor of California, carrying
his Teilhard with him. But these rel¬
icts of the Catholic Renaissance
liked the fact that Merton was fa¬
mously still detached, still in a silent
monastery; it gave his rush of new
writings about civil rights and peace
a moral heft they needed.

Merton wanted to be with these
former Catholic Renaissance
figures—but he was wedged too far
back in the monastic Middle Ages to
slip out easily. Rather than leaving
the holy for the profane, he would
try to blend the two. He found ways
to get out of the abbey for conferences,
health treatments, meetings with ed¬
itors and agents. His ecstatic reac¬
tion in 1964 at returning to New
York, whose tawdry allure was
scorned in The Seven Storey Mown-
tain, was that of a man drearily im¬
prisoned and desperate to be free.

Merton’s superiors tried to re¬
strain him, mainly by censoring his
writings. This reached a crisis in
1962, although Gordon does not
explore this. From Rome, the abbot
general of the Cistercian order,
Dom Gabriel Sortais, ordered Mer¬
ton to stop writing about the nuclear
threat. Merton wrote to his circle of
outside admirers that Cistercians

thought his position “a hateful dis¬
traction, withdrawing one’s mind
from Baby Jesus in the Crib. Strange
to say, no one seems concerned at the
fact that the crib is directly under
the bomb.” He had access to mim¬
eograph machines, so he circulated
his own version of samizdat, smug¬
gled past monastic guards, supplying
his allies with new arguments they
could quote among themselves or in
their own writing.

Despite opposition from a hostile
abbot, Merton was surprisingly suc¬
cessful at getting the visitors and
books and music he wanted to keep
him up with “the movement.” He
was reading James Baldwin, Frantz
Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver, and Mal¬
colm X, and listening to the Beatles,
Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and
Joan Baez. He worked through two
contacts to get a visit from Baez, and
they commiserated with Dylan in a
stressful time for the singer.

He was able to get such special
treatment simply because he threat¬
ened to leave the Cistercians for a
more contemplative life in stricter
monasteries. In 1965, to keep him
on the vast grounds of the abbey,
the abbot approved a state of virtual
secession within the monastery.
Merton could live in his own her¬
mitage, distant from the main
house, where he asked that other
monks not visit him. He said that
he wanted more solitude, but he
told the truth in his journal, that
he wanted “all the liberty and lee¬
way I have in the hermitage.” It
gave admiring outsiders easier ac¬
cess to him and let him slip off the
grounds to make unmonitored
phone calls to them. Gregory Zil-
boorg, the first psychoanalyst who
treated him, said, “You want a her¬
mitage in Times Square with a
large sign over it saying hermit.”

One year into life at his own her¬
mitage, he found the place useful in
an unanticipated way. In 1966, he
had back surgery in a Louisville
hospital, where he fell in love with
a young student nurse. Though
many people think he referred to
her only as “M,” to protect her pri¬
vacy, he wrote of her in his journal
as Margie. (It was the editor of the
relevant journal volume who first

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used “M.”) Merton had been visit¬
ing another psychiatrist, James
Wygal, for his depression. The doc¬
tor, though he did not approve of
the tryst, lent them (not for the
last time) his office for their meet¬
ing. Later Merton wrote: “I keep
remembering her body, her naked¬
ness, the day at Wygal’s, and it
haunts me.” In his poems to her, he
would write of their “worshiping
hands” and how “I cling to the
round hull/Of your hips.” She was
twenty-five; he was fifty-one.

He used trips to the airport for
meeting literary friends as excuses
for seeing her. She also met him in
a woods by the abbey, bringing a
picnic basket and a bottle of sau-
terne, where, he wrote, “[we] drank
our wine and read poems and talked
of ourselves and mostly made love
and love and love.” When an over¬
heard phone call to her was report¬
ed to his abbot, that official tried to
break off the affair. Though the ab¬
bot did not want to lose Merton
from Gethsemani, keeping him
there while the affair continued
would risk a scandal. Merton
thought Abbot James Fox was inhu¬
man and “jealous of me.” He was or¬
dered by the abbot to make a com¬
plete break. The abbot asked for
Margie’s name, to write her himself,
explaining why there would be no
more phone calls, but Merton refused.

When Baez and the peace activist
Ira Sandperl visited Merton’s hermit¬
age, and heard how he missed Margie,
who had gone back to her home in
Cincinnati after finishing her train¬
ing in the Louisville hospital,

Joan was ready to drive ninety miles
an hour through the rain to Cincin¬
nati so I could see M when she got off
at the hospital (11:30 pm). So went to
Bardstown and called M. But then
they could not get their reservations
changed to a convenient time. Just as
well I did not go!

Other monks sensed that some¬
thing was wrong with Merton, but
he dismissed them as “Boy Scouts.”
When, in the fifth month of the af¬
fair, Abbot Fox realized that Merton
was not keeping his verbal promises,
Merton offered him a written pledge
to observe solitude for the rest of his

life. Merton was surprisingly jaunty
about this in his journal:

Dom James signed it with me, content
that he now had me in the bank as an
asset that would not go out and lose
itself in some crap game of love (is he
sure—? The awful crap game of love!).

But as soon as he took a trip to the
University of Louisville library, he
found a phone booth from which to
call Margie, and wrote her a poem
about the call.

He justified breaking his pledge
out of concern for her, suggesting
that a complete end to their relation¬
ship “would be very bad for her.” But
ultimately what he cared most about
was the audience he had created for
his spiritual leadership:

There are too many people in the
world who rely on the fact that I am
serious about deepening an inner di¬
mension of experience that they de¬
sire and that is closed to them. And it
is not closed to me. This is a gift that
has been given me not for myself but
for everyone, even including Margie. I
cannot let it be squandered and dissi¬
pated foolishly. It would be criminal
to do so. In the end I would ruin her
along with myself.

M ary Gordon does not seem
to feel the essential smug¬
ness of this pose. Merton’s
commitment to Margie had always
been hedged about with his prestige
as a monk. “I don’t really want mar¬
ried life anyway; I want the life I have
vowed.” Gordon is right to treat the
six-month obsession with “M” as triv¬
ial in itself. This was never Shake¬
speare’s “marriage of true minds,” as
exemplified by Abelard and Heloise.
Here deep did not call to deep, but
shallow to shallow.

Yet the web of lies that Gordon
stipulates for Merton in love is not
confined to that episode. It is at one
with a pattern built into his “aposto-
late” as the with-it monk. He pre¬
tended to love the monastic commu¬
nity he thought full of “half-wits,”
whom he wanted nothing more to do
with, as part of the quest for a “greater
solitude” he used to increase his audi¬
ence of fans and the famous. He wanted
the best of both worlds, as a holy
preacher and a covert sinner. ■

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

DOWN AND OUT IN THE
PELOPONNESUS

Christos Ikonomou’s modern tragedies
By Francine Prose

Discussed in this essay:

Good Will Come from the Sea, by Christos Ikonomou. Translated from the Greek
by Karen Emmerich. Archipelago. 252 pages. $18.

Something Will Happen, You’ll See, by Christos Ikonomou. Translated from the
Greek by Karen Emmerich. Archipelago. 276 pages. $18.

C hristos Ikonomou’s powerful
short stories chronicle the
lives—and inner lives—of
struggling, working-class Greeks: un¬
employed, desperately poor, men and
women, young and old, the victims of
Greece’s decadelong economic crisis
and of failed austerity measures, the
consequences of massive govern¬
ment debt and a long, catastrophic

F rancine Prose is the author, most recently,
of Mister Monkey (Harper). She is a com
tributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.

recession. The two collections—
Something Will Happen, You’ll See
and Good Will Come from the Sea —
which have been published here in
superb translations by Karen Emm¬
erich, have, as their titles, predic¬
tions and promises that don’t come
true—certainly not in the hopeful
ways they might seem to suggest.

Set in the port city of Piraeus, not
far from Athens, many of the stories
in Something Will Happen were writ¬
ten before the crisis of 2008. But life

in Ikonomou’s Piraeus is already
grim enough. A couple breaks up
over the contents of a piggy bank. A
father who lost his job when the lo¬
cal factory shut down scrambles for
the money to feed his son and buy
him a chocolate Easter egg—a quest
that ends in a painful encounter
with Jesus’ crown of thorns.

In “The Things They Carried,”
five men warm themselves around a
fire outside the social security office
on a bitterly cold January night so
they can be the first on line to con¬
sult the doctors in the morning. The
litany of what they bring with them
echoes Tim O’Brien’s story about sol¬
diers in Vietnam, though
what these beleaguered
Greeks carry has more to
do with poverty, memory,
and loss than with the
revelatory contents of an
American soldier’s pack.
“Deep inside,” Ikonomou
writes, “each carried fear
and stress and worry
about illness and time,
which came each day
like a conscientious gar¬
dener to trim off a bit of
their lives.”

The stories in Good
Will Come from the Sea
take place on an un¬
named island to which a
group of mainland
Greeks have migrated,
drawn by the promise of
a fresh start and a mar¬
ginally better life. In¬
stead they find a society
that has sunk lower than
the one they left behind.
In Athens, a character
tells us, it’s easier—there
are more people, you can
do what you want. But everyone on
the island knows everyone and hears
everything, and criminals are in
charge. Thugs, thieves, and killers
have moved into the vacuum left by
the lack of a functioning government.

The newcomers are hated by the
locals, who call them “foreigners”
and “Athenians,” regardless of
whether they come from Athens.
In turn, the recent arrivals refer to
the locals as “rats.” Hardly noticed
by tourists struggling with restaurant

‘Ship,” by Georges Salameh. Courtesy the artist

REVIEWS

MY LIFE IN THE

SERVICE

THE WORLD WAR II DIARY OF

GEORGE MCGOVERN

WtiA ok inJ tiimVK iel edh by Andrew j. Becevicit

MY LIFE IN
THE SERVICE i

Id War II Diary of

MCGOVERN

MY LIFE IN THE SERVICE
FEATURES A FACSIMILE OF
THE DIARY GEORGE MCGOVERN
KEPT FROM HIS FIRST DAYS OF
BASIC TRAINING TO THE END OF
THE WAR. HASTILY JOTTED IN
HIS EXACTING HAND (A TYPED
TRANSCRIPTION IS INCLUDED),
THE PAGES CONVEY THE
IMMEDIACY OF MCGOVERN’S
WARTIME EXPERIENCES.

INTRODUCTION BY

ANDREW J. BACEVICH

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
OF HARPER’S MAGAZINE

STORE.HARPERS.ORG

FRANKLIN

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PRESS

two groups are locked in combat.
When a baptismal font disappears
from a church, the “rats” accuse the
“Athenians” of stealing it:

The hell we did, we said. What the
fuck would we do with a font? Use it
as a kiddie pool or something? No,
they said, you sold it for copper. Ten
euros per kilo, a hundred-kilo font,
that’s a clean thousand in your
pockets. Well, we said, if we’re
counting to a thousand, your wives
and daughters have probably sucked
a thousand dicks this year, you can
start there.

Idealists don’t fare well in this
world. In the opening story, “I’ll
Swallow Your Dreams,” an optimist
named Tasos believes it might be
possible to improve life on the island:

Good will come from the sea, he said.
I don’t know why that had stuck in
his head, but he said it all the time.
And always in the same way, kind of
singing, and if you asked, he’d tell
you it was a line from a song.

Everyone knows better than to
complain about the homegrown mafi¬
osi who ship the island’s agricultural
produce to Athens and sell the is¬
landers (at a huge markup) Dutch to¬
matoes, Egyptian potatoes, grouper
from Senegal, and “navel oranges,
origin South Africa, warning, rind
unsuitable for human consumption,
preserved with imazalil and thiabenda¬
zole ... drenched in insecticides.” The
price of protest is too high. “Who in
their right mind would speak up?...
Henchmen, guys packing heat, a
whole parade of Corleones. You talk,
you’re done. You raise your head, they
blow it off.”

Only Tasos keeps talking, until his
protests anger Xellinakis, the mob¬
ster who controls the import busi¬
ness, and whose thugs find creative
ways to silence Tasos: “They tied
him to the hood of his truck and ran
him through the car wash. Soap,
brushes, industrial dryers, the whole
works. He was in the hospital for a
week, broken teeth, his body flayed
by the brushes and chemicals.”

Tasos refuses to back down, urges
his neighbors to organize and
threatens to make the criminals re¬
pay what they’ve stolen:

From now on you’ll put ten percent of
your profits every year toward build¬
ing roads, sidewalks, nursery
schools.... It’s time for you to do
something for the island. And since
you won’t do it on your own, we’ll
have to force you....

That’s the sort of stuff he said, the
same bullshit you read online by the av¬
erage blogger in need of a good lay.

Tensions escalate until a confron¬
tation occurs outside a cave, known
as the Refuge, where Tasos and his
community are celebrating Easter.
The choice of the cave—as a party
space and killing ground—can’t be
accidental. The author, his charac¬
ters, and presumably his readers are
aware of the role that caves served
as portals to the underworld in
Greek mythology and literature.
And that’s how the Refuge func¬
tions for poor Tasos:

He stood there at the mouth of the
cave—a little drop of a man before
all that black. He stood and looked at
us, his eyes as red as can be, and his
face red too, his scars seemed to have
swollen and his whole face looked
like a mask that someone held up to
the fire until it slowly started to melt.
He pulled the gun from his pocket
and said something that none of us
heard, then disappeared into the
cave at a run.

Tasos’s wife and friends sit outside
around a campfire, waiting for him
to reappear, knowing he won’t. They
are frightened, first of

things coming alive in the dark....
And then another fear grips you, a
bigger one, because you realize how
terrifying it is, how terrifying that
you’ve begun to react not like a per¬
son but like something else.... And
what scares you most of all is that
you don’t know what that other thing
is that you’ve started to become—
what will come next, what does a
person become when he stops being
a person, what is there on the other
side of human?

Then you think how, in the end,
this is what that poor bastard Tasos
was trying to do. He may not have
known it, but he was struggling to stay
human, to keep on being a person. Not
a good person, or a proper person, or a
better person, just a person—a person,
plain and simple.

Distributed by Midpoint Trade
Books, a division of IPG

84 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

T his question—how does one
maintain one’s humanity in
a destroyed country?—is at
the heart of many of these stories. It
runs beneath the descriptions of
poverty, unemployment, of taking or
not taking political action, of dreams
nurtured or shattered. In an inter¬
view in The Nassau Literary Review
in 2015, Ikonomou spoke of his work
as both documenting and transcend¬
ing the hardships of life in modern
Greece to get at something univer¬
sal, to get under the skin of his char¬
acters and reveal what they share
with people everywhere:

Literature is not some kind of politi¬
cal manifestation. Yes, of course as a
writer you may have whatever ideology
or political principles, or you may be
left, right, or whatever, but here these
people have their own personali¬
ties. ... They are saying and they are
doing a lot of things that I would not
say or do myself, but that’s ... why I
am writing literature. I’m trying to be
someone else.

Many of his characters have a very
clear, tough-minded sense of what
has gone wrong with their country,
but because these characters are so
well drawn and fully realized, their
political analysis feels uniquely
theirs, not that of the author speak¬
ing through them. In “Kites in July,”
a young man, Stavros, disagrees
about recent history with his girl¬
friend’s rich Greek-German (“more
German than German”) uncle. Ac¬
cording to Uncle Raphael:

Over the past few years, Greece had
committed the perfect crime. Actual
perpetrators: politicians. Moral per¬
petrators: voters. Motive: to buy peo¬
ple’s conscience. Weapon: money—
foreign money, black market money,
easy money. Victim: the nation.

That was his theory in a nutshell.
And as much as Stavros felt like giv¬
ing him a piece of his mind in return,
he always held his tongue.

Do us a favor and go fuck yourself,
Uncle Raphael, he wanted to say. Ev¬
eryone’s always pointing fingers at this
crime or that, but the Germans sure
are ones to speak. And drop that line
about Europe already. What Europe?
Europe only existed on maps and in
books.... What do I have to do with a
Dane, a Swede, a Czech? And what

exactly was our crime? The fact that
we wanted a shingle or two over our
heads, wanted to buy a car?

Ikonomou gives great dignity
and intelligence to his characters,
who are capable of quick humor, of
complex philosophical inquiry,
moral speculation, and metaphysi¬
cal rumination. They want myths,
and like us they want to be told
stories. The father searching for his
lost son in “Good Will Come from
the Sea”—the son he urged to go
work for a sociopathic shipowner—
passes landmarks with fairy-tale
names (Dragon Cave, Beast’s Hole,
Mute’s Spring, Seven Threshing
FI oors, Murderer’s Gorge, the
Church of the Butchered Virgin)
and longs for the resolution that
ends even the most frightening
fairy tales.

“Fairy tales always end well,” he
thinks aloud to himself. “Right?
Right. They lived well and we live
even better. Of course. That’s how
the story goes.”

Ikonomou’s heroes are often re¬
duced to silence; they can’t say what
needs to be said. In “Placard and
Broomstick,” a man attempting to
make a sign protesting the workplace
death of his friend winds up appear¬
ing at the site with a blank placard,
because what he wants to say is too
monumental and bewildering to fit
onto a piece of cardboard:

He wanted to write something that
would express unspeakable rage and
hatred and love and despair all at
once. Or maybe it should be some
plain, dry slogan, the kind of thing
a political party might say about
workplace fatalities, about people
who die on the job. Or maybe some¬
thing like the things they write on
the gravestones of people who die in
vain, or too young. Something
about god and the soul and angels
and the afterlife.

S tavros and Artemis, the lovers
in “Kites in July,” have a vision
not unlike Tasos’s: they plan to
build an eco-friendly hotel and use
the profits to help the island.

The couple borrows money from
Artemis’s Uncle Raphael and reno¬
vates a shack they plan to open as a
waterfront ouzerie called Good Will

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Come from the Sea. Their friends
warn them that it’s madness to under-
cut what the gangsters are charging
in their cafes. (“It’s like me renting a
double room for twenty euros a night
when everyone else in my category
charges a hundred. That’s not how
things work. There’s a system. There
are cartels.”) But the couple clings
to their dream.

By now the reader already knows
that the couple’s little world has
ended before it began. The ouzerie
has been torched by the same gang¬
sters who drove Tasos into the cave
at the collection’s start. “Those rats
had done a fine job. Real profession¬
als. It was all ash now, nothing was
left standing.”

Throughout, Ikonomou’s style
veers between flights of incantatory
lyricism and volleys of funny lines
and tough street talk. Again one
wants to praise Karen Emmerich’s
translation: How does one recognize
and render the Greek words for
“scratch-offs and quick picks”? Sen¬
tences go on for pages as characters
mourn lost loves and debate the vir¬
tues of selflessness and the existence
of evil.

In “Something Will Happen,
You’ll See,” a woman whose home is
about to be seized by the bank
watches TV and thinks about her
life in a passage that precisely ren¬
ders the types of thought processes
that make Ikonomou’s work—
despite the sad stories it tells—so
energizing and moving:

There was a documentary on about

American Indians but Niki just

stared out the balcony door at the

glow from the floodlights over at the
electric plant. That afternoon a
bunch of workers had climbed up on
the chimney and hung a banner and
shouted slogans. She watched the
beams from the floodlights slicing
the darkness like enormous swords
and wondered how an artist would
paint this scene—if there were still
artists left in the world who painted
scenes like that: a woman sitting in
the dark with a cup of coffee and a
cigarette, her face lit by the dim blue
light of the television. Wouldn’t be
much of a painting. Maybe if she had a
gun in her hand, or a vibrator. Coffee
and cigarettes wouldn’t cut it. People
don’t get excited any more about old-
fashioned things. Who cares about the
finances and family problems of the pe¬
tit bourgeoisie? Tres banal.

The rhapsodic lyricism and dry
gallows humor, the speed and nimble¬
ness of the tonal shifts, drew me in to
these books. The sympathy of Ikono¬
mou’s characterization—the humanity
he captures on the page—made me
keep reading. These stories show the
challenges of ordinary life—falling
in love, working or not working, liv¬
ing in families, dying—in a de¬
stroyed economy. It’s one thing to
read a newspaper item about how
the Greek austerity measures cut
back basic services, but it’s a differ¬
ent thing entirely to find ourselves,
thanks to Ikonomou, in a scruffy
neighborhood, where the street¬
lights have gone out and a scrawny
young guy named Mao, whose sister
has been gang-raped, sits outside in
the pitch dark, accompanied only by
his cat, keeping watch over his
blacked-out streets. ■

Harper’s Magazine is owned and published monthly by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation, 666 Broadway,
New York, N.Y. 10012. Tel: 212-420-5720. Andrew J. Bacevich, Chairman; John R. MacArthur, President;
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HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

PUZZLE

MYSTERY

By Richard E. Maltby Jr.

M m^ecent news has included a mystery that
is referred to in several ways, one of which is
1A. Since no one likes an unsolved mystery,
this puzzle offers nine possible—and equally
likely—solutions.

Clued answers include five proper nouns. 3D
is uncommon. As always, mental repunctuation
of a clue is the key to its solution. The solution
to last month’s puzzle appears on page 61.

K™

46"

ACROSS

1. See instructions (6,6,3)

12. Love the first person not seen in Dior perfume (4)

13. Singer-songwriter to a degree gets a pass driving in New
York City (4)

15. You’ll shun me—I’ll put you off right back! (5)

16. Copying a revised outline that covers article and
manuscript’s heading (9)

17. Departs but, not having left, they hang around the house (5)

18. See instructions (4,8)

20. River from a state—take notice (4)

21. See instructions (8)

23. See instructions (4)

24. In a new series, a rerun is common (6)

25. Portion, first to last, found in hoppers (5)

26. See instructions (5) (with 31D)

29. Good Humor ordered by a militia (10)

32. Quantity of crack I located? (4)

33. See instructions (5,4)

36. Questionable N.Y. material concerned with nutrition (10)
39. As they say in Rome, “Where is the bird?” (4)

41. Go out, see what a stripper does backwards (5)

43. Jazzy organist is hot (8)

45. See instructions (6,7)

49. See instructions (5,6)

50. NYC sign: characters working together! (7)

51. Pass out, in the past, from green cheese (7)

DOWN

1. Pound is one place one enters timidly, initially (4)

2. See instructions (6,7)

3. Packet of coins, or rising field between two
universities (7)

4. Don’t start job with doctors (see #44) (5)

5. Latina, on becoming a citizen (8)

6. See instructions (4,9)

7. Not exactly normal around gold records once (8)

8. Horny character in The Waste Land (5)

9. Volkwagen’s starter is being installed in actual new
version;... (7)

10. ... can need, perhaps, two jacks (6)

11. Times essay cut, says, in strikes (6)

14. Nepenthe doesn’t need the funny-looking tubes (5)

19. Fools someone sailing with less than full value (9)

22. Clear as the Seine? (3)

27. Witty company doctor (7)

28. Quickly, look up a place in a castle (4)

30. Lady reporter ably following her lead (3)

31. See instructions (6) ( see 26A)

34. Corruption in brothels (3)

35. Study how to say you didn’t do it? No, yes? (3)

37. Cadre, after maneuvers, bowed (5)

38. Famous TV series about second-level robots (5)

40. Lisi, the Italian name, in almost viral surroundings (5)
42. An up-and-down foodstuff (4)

44. Crack shot (4)

46. Good person from 42D, after making AAU (3)

47. Facelessly kids the aspirations of the Hebrews! (3)

48. Upset, go down to get a pointer, maybe (3)

Contest Rules: Send completed diagram with name and address to “Mystery,” Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. If you
already subscribe to Harper’s, please include a copy of your latest mailing label. Entries must be received by April 12. The sender of the first correct
solution opened at random will receive a one-year subscription to Harper’s Magazine (limit one winner per household per year). The winner’s name
will be printed in the June issue. The winner of the February puzzle, “Crazy Quilt,” is William Spont, Santa Monica, Calif.

PUZZLE

FINDINGS

C arp were dying of herpes in Babylon. Peste des petits
ruminants struck a lamb-fattening unit in Israel. Salmo¬
nellosis outbreaks were blamed on Crisp & Delicious
chicken nuggets in Canada, on pet hedgehogs in the
United States, and on Spanish powdered milk in France.
The Namibian government warned of diarrheal shellfish
poisoning, and the New Zealand government warned of
paralytic shellfish poisoning. Zaire Ebola virus was diag¬
nosed in greater long-fingered bats in Liberia. A Wyo¬
ming house cat was diagnosed with plague. Anthrax was
suspected in the death of an elephant calf in India and
in the deaths of at least forty-five hippos in Malawi.
Humans and cattle in the Mayotte archipelago came
down with Rift Valley fever, and Brazilian pigs contracted
Seneca Valley virus. Japanese officials began slaughter¬
ing 6,600 hogs in Toyota City in an attempt to contain
classical swine fever, and Denmark planned to fence its
border with Germany to guard against boars infected
with African swine fever. Karnatakan monkeys were
found dead from Kyasanur Forest disease, and rope
squirrels were suspected of spreading monkeypox in the
Central African Republic. A late potato blight struck
Nigeria’s Plateau State, Stewart’s wilt was afflicting
Slovenian corn, Xylella wilt was found in French lav¬
ender in a Portuguese zoo, and a mystery bacterium was
wilting black pepper on South Indian plantations. An
MRSA outbreak originated at a massage parlor in
Kuala Lumpur. Keralan sanitation workers were beset
with scrub typhus, and murine typhus had infiltrated
Los Angeles City Hall.

I^ritish military personnel who served in Afghani¬
stan’s Helmand Province were found to have come
down with Q fever. Fake news during the 2016 presi¬

dential election was shared by 18.1 percent of Repub¬
lican Facebook users and 3.5 percent of Democratic
Facebook users, and 15 percent of Republicans and
20 percent of Democrats feel it would be best if most
members of the other party “just died.” Republicans
live longer than Democrats. In religious countries,
people buried in piously decorated graves tend to have
lived longer. When ancient Romans were wealthier, their
health was poorer. The surrogate-born female children
of gay male couples are particularly well-adjusted. New
research described the parenting behaviors of the male
smooth guardian frog. A mate was found for Romeo,
who has lived alone in a Bolivian aquarium for ten years
and was thought to be the last of the Sehuencas water
frogs. A small snake found in the stomach of a larger
snake in Chiapas in 1976 was determined to be a new
species that has never been found outside the snake
that ate it.

Agaves everywhere are getting stronger. A Scottish lab
created a rogue wave. Antarctica is losing six times more
ice annually than it was forty years ago, and Greenland
was found to be melting four times as fast as it was in
2003. Tens of thousands of starving guillemots were
washing up in the Netherlands. Scientists warned that
humans should not create octopus farms. British fish
wholesalers are selling the wrong sharks. A fermented
beluga whale flipper was blamed for the death of a man
in Nome, Alaska. Speakers of Farsi and Lao are unusu¬
ally precise at describing taste, whereas speakers of
Umpila outperformed all other languages’ speakers in
their identification of smell. People have better working
memory if, in their native language, meanings remain,
until the end of the sentence, unclear. ■

Midsummer Night’s Dream, enamel on canvas, by Inka Essenhigh. Courtesy the artist and Miles M cEnery Gallery, New York City

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2019

HARPER’S

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